My name is Rishi Gadepally and I am a second year medical student at Thomas Jefferson University.
The field of AI in Healthcare is vast and can be intimidating for those without a formal background. I became interested in the applications of AI and Healthcare before I started medical school and began taking classes online, reading papers, and watching YouTube videos on the topic. I learned about the concepts and theory that had laid the foundation for these new technologies but didn’t have a formal background in coding, advanced math, or data science. I felt like I had hit a wall and didn’t know where to go from there.
This course serves as a practical introduction to anyone looking to augment their knowledge and get hands-on experience. Within the first few videos, I felt like I was equipped with the tools and vocabulary to start reading medical AI papers and understand the metrics that were used to describe a model’s performance.
I also learned how to analyze and apply pre-existing ML models to publicly available datasets. While knowing how to code in Python is definitely an asset, this course showed me that a deep understanding of the language was not required for applying pre-existing models to publicly available data. Halfway through the course, I was able to download a medical dataset off of Kaggle and use the XGBoost model to predict the likelihood of ‘stroke’ vs ‘no stroke.’ I was then able to use shap to visualize the variables from the dataset that the model used to make its predictions. The learning did not stop here, as debugging and understanding why errors were occurring is equally important!
One of the major benefits of this course is its introduction to high-level tools from companies like Amazon and Google that allow people without any ML or coding experience to deploy models on their own data. This breaks down the technical barrier that has stopped creative professionals (and amateurs) from bringing their ideas to life.
Overall, this course is perfect for anyone in healthcare looking to get their start in AI, regardless of their background and experience. It will build a foundation on the fundamentals of AI in healthcare and can serve as a launching pad for those who want to delve deeper into the field.
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