Cross-Jurisdiction Comparative Research in Work Disability Prevention: Introduction to the Special Series

Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation - The systems that societies construct to support work disability prevention can have powerful effects on both the experiences of people with work disability...     

Artificial Intelligence and Black‐Box Medical Decisions: Accuracy versus Explainability

Although decision‐making algorithms are not new to medicine, the availability of vast stores of medical data, gains in computing power, and breakthroughs in machine learning are accelerating the pace of their development, expanding the range of questions they can address, and increasing their predictive power. In many cases, however, the most powerful machine learning techniques purchase diagnostic or predictive accuracy at the expense of our ability to access “the knowledge within the machine.” Without an explanation in terms of reasons or a rationale for particular decisions in individual cases, some commentators regard ceding medical decision‐making to black box systems as contravening the profound moral responsibilities of clinicians. I argue, however, that opaque decisions are more common in medicine than critics realize. Moreover, as Aristotle noted over two millennia ago, when our knowledge of causal systems is incomplete and precarious—as it often is in medicine—the ability to explain how results are produced can be less important than the ability to produce such results and empirically verify their accuracy.     

Serum testosterone level as possible predictive marker in androgen receptor axis-targeting agents and taxane chemotherapies for castration-resistant prostate cancer

Purpose

Currently, several therapeutic options for castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) are available, for which predictive biomarkers have not been established. Therefore, we aimed to reveal the association between pretreatment serum testosterone level and antitumor outcomes when treated with androgen receptor axis-targeting agents and taxane chemotherapies for CRPC.

Influence of fracture obliquity and interlocking nail screw configuration on interfragmentary motion in distal metaphyseal tibia fractures

European Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery & Traumatology - The indications for the use of intramedullary (IM) nails have been extended to include extra-articular distal metaphyseal tibia...