[lasagnaphil]

I think ML's currently temporarily useful in fields that have been making decisions mostly based on intuition and heuristics. The medical field's one example, even with some knowledge on biology and anatomy it's hard to diagnose and treat patients only with deductive reasoning, a lot of guesswork and "experience" is involved. In that case ML might be able to perform better than humans, but I think this will have its limits. Above a certain point, I think biological simulation (as in physics simulation) would be a much more useful tool for doctors to understand the human body.

[Enginerrrd]

I'm skeptical... But it depends what data sources are available. I was a paramedic so my medical knowledge is limited, but at the same time, we frequently had to do field diagnosis. It's hard to explain... but you can have patients with the same symptoms and two totally different diagnoses. You basically just learn to intuit the difference but none of the stuff we can write down or quantify drives the differential diagnosis. And it's funny because you get pretty good at it. I could just tell when an elderly patient had a UTI even though they had a whole cluster of weird symptoms. Or more importantly, I could tell you when someone was just a psych case despite complaining of symptoms matching some other condition with great accuracy.

It'd be really hard to train a computer when to stop digging because there's nothing find, or when to keep digging because this patient really doesn't feel like a psych case. And the tests and doagnostics aren't without risk and cost.

I've had a greybeard doctor in my personal life that somehow read between the lines and nailed a diagnosis despite my primary symptoms being something else entirely. (I had recurring strep tonsilitis for months and yet he just somehow knew to step back and order a mono test. It came back negative the first time, and he knew to have me tested AGAIN, and lo and behold it was positive.) None of symptoms were really consistent with mono. I tested positive for strep each time and antibiotics would clear it.). Thankfully I happen to be allergic to the first line antibiotic because if you give amoxicillin to someone with mono they'll get a horrible rash all over their body in like 90% of people.

[hderms]

I don't know, if you ever look at a flowchart of biochemical processes, realizing that what we've mapped out is only a tiny sliver of what actually occurs, you'd be more pessimistic about simulation in the near term. We can simulate things all we want but the hard part is rooting the simulation in hard evidence, something which requires massive capital and time investment. Epigenetics complicate even further.

[imbnwa]

Would you happen to have any links to share further explaining the limits of our knowledge of biochem processes?

How does epigentics complicate this further, is it that it wides the number of inputs into a biochem system

[jpeloquin]

Not exactly what you asked for, but PathBank is a database that quantitatively describes a large part of what we do know: https://pathbank.org/

As far as what we don't know, I'm not sure there's a list. Lack of knowledge implies lack of awareness. I can offer one example: We don't know much about the processes by which collagen fibers are grown and assembled into μm- and mm-scale load-bearing structures in tendon, ligament, bone between embryo and adult, particularly in mammals. Or the extent to which collagen fiber structures are capable of turnover in adults; healing might only be possible by replacement with inferior tissue such as scar.

Personally, I think the complexity of biological systems, and the difficulty of observing their components directly when and where you'd want to, means that they can only be understood with the help of machines. Not necessarily using convolutional neural networks though.

[hderms]

Yeah it would increase the conditionality or contextuality of any given observation because even if the genomes were identical, you have differing levels of gene expression based on environmental stimuli.

So observing that gene X impacts biochemical pathway in some way Y is already really difficult when there are tons of other genes at play. Add on the fact that these genes could be triggered to stop expressing themselves in certain conditions and it makes the whole process of figuring out what is really going on that much more difficult. Even if we can make some observation, there are tons of contextual situations which would potentially invalidate that observation.