A survey of data element perspective: Application of artificial intelligence in health big data

Artificial intelligence (AI) based on the perspective of data elements is widely used in the healthcare informatics domain. Large amounts of clinical data from electronic medical records (EMRs), electronic health records (EHRs), and electroencephalography records (EEGs) have been generated and collected at an unprecedented speed and scale. For instance, the new generation of wearable technologies enables easy-collecting peoples' daily health data such as blood pressure, blood glucose, and physiological data, as well as the application of EHRs documenting large amounts of patient data. The cost of acquiring and processing health big data is expected to reduce dramatically with the help of AI technologies and open-source big data platforms such as Hadoop and Spark. The application of AI technologies in health big data presents new opportunities to discover the relationship among living habits, sports, inheritances, diseases, symptoms, and drugs. Meanwhile, with the development of fast-growing AI technologies, many promising methodologies are proposed in the healthcare field recently. In this paper, we review and discuss the application of machine learning (ML) methods in health big data in two major aspects: (1) Special features of health big data including multimodal, incompletion, time validation, redundancy, and privacy. (2) ML methodologies in the healthcare field including classification, regression, clustering, and association. Furthermore, we review the recent progress and breakthroughs of automatic diagnosis in health big data and summarize the challenges, gaps, and opportunities to improve and advance automatic diagnosis in the health big data field.

Automated summary

Artificial intelligence based on data elements is widely used in healthcare informatics, particularly in health big data. The generation and collection of large quantities of clinical data from electronic medical records and wearable technologies have become easier and faster. With the help of AI technologies and open-source big data platforms, the cost of acquiring and processing health big data can be significantly reduced. This presents new opportunities for discovering relationships among living habits, sports, inheritances, diseases, symptoms, and drugs. Machine learning methods have been extensively applied in health big data, and recent progress has been made in automatic diagnosis.