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Machine Learning in Health Care (Blended Learning) (CHME0018)

Key information

Faculty
Faculty of Population Health Sciences
Teaching department
Institute of Health Informatics
Credit value
15
Restrictions
This a compulsory module for students on the MSc Global Healthcare Management (Analytics), an optional module on the MSc/PG Dip/PG Cert in Health Informatics and MSc/PG Dip/PG Cert in Health Data Analytics.
Timetable

Alternative credit options

There are no alternative credit options available for this module.

Description

This module will provide you with an introduction to the principles of machine learning in healthcare and biomedicine, covering the key concepts involved in designing and evaluating approaches to machine learning. The module will focus on applied methods for problems in prevention, diagnosis, therapy, aetiology, and prognosis. You will be given a practical introduction to common approaches, offering you experience in using different machine learning algorithms and concepts (including decision trees, logistic regression, support vector machines, artificial neural nets, ensembles and deep learning) in the context of healthcare.

At the end of this module you will be able to:

1) Outline the definition of machine learning and its essential terminology; identify potential areas of its application in healthcare; describe the evaluation of classification models.

2) Describe hyperparameter tuning and evaluation of a machine learning model.

3) Present the foundational concepts of probabilistic learning such as Bayes’ theorem.

4) Explain the principles of decision tree learning and apply it to health data.

5) Articulate the underlying concepts of deep neural networks and apply them to a multidimensional feature space of health data.

6) Describe the importance and key concepts of data pre-processing and dimensionality reduction and apply them to a feature space of health data.

7) Define the theoretical principles of support vector machines and apply these methods to health data.

8) Contrast different classifiers and construct an ensemble classifier for decision making.

9) Get informed on the latest developments AI in medicine (e.g., clinical natural language processing, generative AI for biomedicine and deep learning for medical imaging).

10) Understand the caveats of applying machine learning in health including bias and inequalities embedded in the data and/or induced by AI models

The module is delivered through web-based distance learning in the UCL Virtual Learning Environment plus a 3-day face-to-face teaching session.

  • Rajpurkar, Pranav, et al. “AI in health and medicine.” Nature Medicine 28.1 (2022): 31-38.
  • Ghahramani, Z., 2015. Probabilistic machine learning and artificial intelligence. Nature, 521(7553), pp.452-459.
  • Wiens, J., & Shenoy, E. S. (2018). Machine learning for healthcare: on the verge of a major shift in healthcare epidemiology. Clinical Infectious Diseases, 66(1), 149-153.
  • Thirunavukarasu, Arun James, et al. "Large language models in medicine."Nature medicine29.8 (2023): 1930-1940.
  • Chen, I. Y., Pierson, E., Rose, S., Joshi, S., Ferryman, K., & Ghassemi, M. (2021). Ethical machine learning in healthcare. Annual review of biomedical data science, 4, 123-144.
  • Vollmer, Sebastian, et al. “Machine learning and artificial intelligence research for patient benefit: 20 critical questions on transparency, replicability, ethics, and effectiveness.” bmj 368 (2020).

Module deliveries for 2024/25 academic year

Intended teaching term: Term 3 Postgraduate (FHEQ Level 7)

Teaching and assessment

Mode of study
Blended
Methods of assessment
100% Coursework
Mark scheme
Numeric Marks

Other information

Number of students on module in previous year
91
Module leader
Dr Honghan Wu
Who to contact for more information
ihi.education@ucl.ac.uk

Last updated

This module description was last updated on 8th April 2024.