Briefs

Wired, By Frederik Joelving, September 30, 2009

Now, a group of researchers at Harvard University has created the first computer model to automatically detect the risk that a patient is being abused at home. The results were published Sept. 29 in the British Medical Journal.

"It's a great concept," said Debra Houry, an emergency physician at Emory University, who was not involved in the research. Although around one in four women experience domestic violence at some point in their lives, she says, the problem often goes unnoticed at a doctor's visit. "It's one of those hidden epidemics where they don't come up to you and disclose the issue."

To get around this problem, Reis and his colleagues tapped into a public U.S. database containing six years of medical history for around half a million people. They fed a large portion of the database into a simple computer model - known as a naive Bayesian classifier - which then calculated the abuse risks linked to different diagnoses such as burns, sprains or mental disorders.

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