Involvement of Machine Learning Tools in Healthcare Decision Making
Authors: Jayatilake Senerath Mudalige Don Alexis Chinthaka , Ganegoda Gamage Upeksha 
Published: January 2021

In the present day, there are many diseases which need to be identified at their early stages to start relevant treatments. If not, they could be uncurable and deadly. Due to this reason, there is a need of analysing complex medical data, medical reports, and medical images at a lesser time but with greater accuracy. There are even some instances where certain abnormalities cannot be directly recognized by humans. In healthcare for computational decision making, machine learning approaches are being used in these types of situations where a crucial data analysis needs to be performed on medical data to reveal hidden relationships or abnormalities which are not visible to humans. Implementing algorithms to perform such tasks itself is difficult, but what makes it even more challenging is to increase the accuracy of the algorithm while decreasing the required time for the algorithm to execute. In the early days, processing of large amount of medical data was an important task which resulted in machine learning being adapted in the biological domain. Since this happened, the biology and biomedical fields have been reaching higher levels by exploring more knowledge and identifying relationships which were never observed before. Reaching to its peak now the concern is being diverted towards treating patients not only based on the type of disease but also their genetics, which is known as precision medicine. Modifications in machine learning algorithms are being performed and tested daily to improve the performance of the algorithms in analysing and presenting more accurate information. In the healthcare field, starting from information extraction from medical documents until the prediction or diagnosis of a disease, machine learning has been involved. Medical imaging is a section that was greatly improved with the integration of machine learning algorithms to the field of computational biology. Nowadays, many disease diagnoses are being performed by medical image processing using machine learning algorithms. In addition, patient care, resource allocation, and research on treatments for various diseases are also being performed using machine learning-based computational decision making. Throughout this paper, various machine learning algorithms and approaches that are being used for decision making in the healthcare sector will be discussed along with the involvement of machine learning in healthcare applications in the current context. With the explored knowledge, it was evident that neural network-based deep learning methods have performed extremely well in the field of computational biology with the support of the high processing power of modern sophisticated computers and are being extensively applied because of their high predicting accuracy and reliability. When giving concern towards the big picture by combining the observations, it is noticeable that computational biology and biomedicine-based decision making in healthcare have now become dependent on machine learning algorithms, and thus they cannot be separated from the field of artificial intelligence.