Thursday, August 17, 2023

Birding analogies to medical cognition

We regularly use "medical cognition" system 1 and system 2 tools to tackle clinical complexity and some of these are are often used through various medical cognitive platforms such as synchronous face to face interactions (often system 1) and asynchronous communication and learning between multiple stakeholders in connected web space (user driven healthcare UDHC, patient journey records PaJR) blended offline and online to form "case based blended learning ecosystems CBBLE (often a blend of system 1 and 2). 

More here : 
Medical cognition riddle of the day :
Birding and medical cognition toward pattern recognition, faster system 1 diagnosis, has similarities and with this video sharing, I am trying to take this cognitive process toward slower system 2 processing of the captured patient/bird data! 

Currently myself and others have different opinions about the diagnosis of the bird here : https://youtu.be/iy1hb_bGT0I

While my diagnosis is  driven by the physical attributes of the bird as in phenotype, my friend's is driven by it's call that doesn't appear to closely match the other captures of the assumed same bird's call available globally in YouTube. 

What is your diagnosis?

This question was circulated in various online fora and some of the reactions have been summarized in the answer below 

Answer : Well I must admit I missed the diagnosis and below is a longish description of today's learning also in medical cognition! 

There were various inputs on the video ranging from :

Need better clarity in the video to not getting the family or genus to at least coming close to the genus. 

 When I first saw this bird today while my friend took the video, I was silently thrilled and kept murmuring that I was witnessing a "lifer" and kept racking my system 1 cognition to help search the nooks and crannies of my biological brain! I vaguely recalled the book written by Salim Ali in my childhood and I thought I could visualize a crest and a name flashed across, South African crested cuckoo! It was a venerated bird of Indian mythology aka chatak, a South African visitor during rains and reputed to keep looking up at the sky till it could have the first drop of  rain. There were other names such as Jacobin's cuckoo and I was quite satisfied with the diagnosis based on this recall bias of a few data points such as crest, rain, similar call (or so I thought). 

My friend wasn't satisfied. She had for some phenotypic reason thought of thrush (and not any cuckoo)  earlier and had spent more time watching this bird than me and her major disagreement was about the bird's call which she thought was plaintive but the Jacobin's (my diagnosis) suggested it was more assertive. 

She took a much more meticulous strategy of looking up whatever birds were sighted in our state in this month from this site https://ebird.org/region/IN-APand zeroed in on the 126th bird in that list and yes on matching the call of this particular species on YouTube here:
it was an auscultatory finding that appeared to be a perfect match! 

Amazing thrill to tick a new bird in the list of a lifetime also known as lifer. 
Responses from group :

MA: Sir many birds a chirping here,,, how can u say that the is cuckoo's only,,,
In the beginning of vedio only cuckoo's sound came,,, after that no sound of her,,, many other birds were chirping,,, so many times I played and heard this video!!

RB :  Yes the call is at the beginning only of the video and the local offline physicians who captured the video here had the advantage of what in medical cognition terms would be labeled, "data capturer's advantage" and would be able to better localize the auscultation findings (bird call) to the phenotype! Thanks for pointing out this limitation of system 2 user driven learning πŸ™‚πŸ™

From one of our other global user driven learner not in the group πŸ‘‡


[8/16, 7:43 AM] Metapsychist 3 Hyderabad: Haven't heard this type of beautiful sound of the bird so far,  but it sounds little similiar to Indian Koila


[8/16, 7:46 AM] Rakesh Biswas: You are close. 

Can you figure out which species of cuckoo using the internet. 

That's how one of our team members found out that I can share after you give it a shot yourself



[8/16, 7:46 AM] Metapsychist 3 Hyderabad: Will try sir !



[8/16, 7:51 AM] Metapsychist 3 Hyderabad: https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxSJW3T7HPh7ynRVrkDKa3PoQr0nzz1eQi



[8/16, 7:51 AM] Metapsychist 3 Hyderabad: Found it sir.....grey bellied cuckoo!


[8/16, 7:51 AM] Metapsychist 3 Hyderabad: I have cropped the sound clip here and sharing for comparison. They both sound same !

Similarly there are so many user driven learning approaches in medical cognition!πŸ‘‡



MA :  Understood Sir now,,,πŸ™
Really it was thrill to search the answer,,, happy to know the correct one,,,πŸ˜‡

What I have described above using a birding analogy is a small world model for "medical cognition" that in the birding analogy is perhaps more akin to what in humans is currently represented as "clinical epidemiology driven evidence based medicine EBM" based on average "homo sapiens" data that can be mapped out at a generalizeable species level (again analogous to generic cuckoo where we were simply trying to identify it at a species level for example which cuckoo, pied crested, or grey bellied) v what we are trying to develop, going beyond just generalizing it to a single human species level such as homo sapiens (as we do not have to deal with other human species such as Neanderthals or homo erectus), we are free to tackle more complex problems at the individual homo sapiens level and that is an emerging area called clinical complexity driven precision medicine that not only utilizes the system 2 clinical epidemiology tools of current EBM but newer tools such as those conceptualized hereπŸ‘‡





Above from Wikipedia under CC licence 

No comments:

Post a Comment