Machine learning (ML) is a promising tool in assisting clinical decision-making for improving diagnosis and prognosis, especially in developing regions. It is often used with large samples, aggregating data from different regions and hospitals. However, it is unclear how this affects predictions in local centers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNutr Metab Cardiovasc Dis
September 2024
Machine learning algorithms are being increasingly used in healthcare settings but their generalizability between different regions is still unknown. This study aims to identify the strategy that maximizes the predictive performance of identifying the risk of death by COVID-19 in different regions of a large and unequal country. This is a multicenter cohort study with data collected from patients with a positive RT-PCR test for COVID-19 from March to August 2020 (n = 8477) in 18 hospitals, covering all five Brazilian regions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArtificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are transforming several areas of the digital world and are increasingly being applied in healthcare. Mobile apps based on predictive machine learning models have the potential to improve health outcomes, but there is still no consensus on how to inform doctors about their results. The aim of this study was to investigate how healthcare professionals prefer to receive predictions generated by machine learning algorithms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe test whether the COVID-19 pandemic has an ethnicity-differentiated (Indigenous vs non-Indigenous) effect on infant health in the Brazilian Amazon. Using vital statistics data we find that Indigenous infants born during the pandemic are 0.5% more likely to have very low birth weights.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHealth Econ Rev
November 2020
Background: The Brazilian public health system is one of the largest health systems in the world, with a mandate to deliver medical care to more than 200 million Brazilians. The objective of this study is to estimate a production function for primary care in urban Brazil. Our goal is to use flexible estimates to identify heterogeneous returns and complementarities between medical capital and labor.
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