Artificial adaptive systems and predictive medicine

An individual patient is not the average representative of the population. Rather he or she is a person with unique characteristics. An intervention may be effective for a population but not necessarily for the individual patient. The recommendation of a guideline may not be right for a particular patient because it is not what he or she wants, and implementing the recommendation will not necessarily mean a favourable outcome. The author describes a reconfiguration of medical thought which originates from non linear dynamics and chaos theory. The coupling of computer science and these new theoretical bases coming from complex systems mathematics allows the creation of “intelligent” agents able to adapt themselves dynamically to problem of high complexity: the Artificial Adaptive Systems, which include Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and Evolutionary Algorithms (EA). ANNs and EA are able to reproduce the dynamical interaction of multiple factors simultaneously, allowing the study of complexity; they can also help medical doctors in making decisions under extreme uncertainty and to draw conclusions on individual basis and not as average trends.