Building Trust: Lessons from the Technion-Rambam Machine Learning in Healthcare Datathon Event
This work addresses training gaps for applying machine learning in healthcare, but it is incremental as it focuses on a specific event and context.
The paper reflects on a datathon event in Israel to identify needs in machine learning training for medical applications, describing opportunities and limitations in medical data science.
A datathon is a time-constrained competition involving data science applied to a specific problem. In the past decade, datathons have been shown to be a valuable bridge between fields and expertise . Biomedical data analysis represents a challenging area requiring collaboration between engineers, biologists and physicians to gain a better understanding of patient physiology and of guide decision processes for diagnosis, prognosis and therapeutic interventions to improve care practice. Here, we reflect on the outcomes of an event that we organized in Israel at the end of March 2022 between the MIT Critical Data group, Rambam Health Care Campus (Rambam) and the Technion Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) in Haifa. Participants were asked to complete a survey about their skills and interests, which enabled us to identify current needs in machine learning training for medical problem applications. This work describes opportunities and limitations in medical data science in the Israeli context.