“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return.”
Leonardo Da Vinci, Renaissance polymath and anatomist.
The apocalyptic world that the COVID-19 pandemic created has begotten fear and helplessness amongst clinicians around the world. This collective frustration has been rooted in the lack of expedient clinical insight and intelligence about this novel coronavirus in a sea of medical data generated in the first few months of this global health crisis.
This is apt timing for an intellectual sanctuary for clinicians, data scientists, and others to convene and decipher the myriad of enigmas in medicine and healthcare. Intelligence-Based Medicine, inspired by a companion textbook of the same title, fosters this nascent multidisciplinary domain as a necessary convergence of principles and applications of not only artificial intelligence, but also human cognition in clinical medicine. This intelligence-based brand of medicine is intimately related to the disciplines of artificial intelligence, data science, cognitive science, mathematics, biomedical informatics, biostatistics, evidence-based medicine, and even biomedical and clinical research. This new domain is the privileged nexus of all these inter-related disciplines but with its own identity as the convolution of data science and human cognition with clinical medicine. This journal will feature original research manuscripts, review articles, opinion pieces, and methodology demonstrations covering wide-ranging topics such as generative adversarial networks, clinician biases and heuristics, convolutional neural networks, edge artificial intelligence, fuzzy cognitive maps, and deep reinforcement learning.
It is the vision of this editor, therefore, to form a synergistic alliance with two other established and renowned Elsevier journals: Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Journal of Biomedical Informatics. The youngest sibling in this family of academic journals, Intelligence-Based Medicine will focus on the information and intelligence paradigm shift in clinical medicine. It is not the intent of this Intelligence-Based Medicine journal to become a repository of good (and even great) data science work without clinical relevance; to the contrary, the works here should have clinical relevance first and foremost, and preferably with clinicians amongst the authors as meaningful contributors in this data science-clinical medicine dyad. In other words, our preference is not to have the perfect machine learning model (with an AUC close to 1.0) with little if any clinical relevance, but our desire is to see multidisciplinary groups develop an appreciation for each other’s domain expertise to engender an innovative approach and perspective using data science and human cognition to solve a significant relevant clinical problem.
Da Vinci’s Renaissance was the golden age of innovation simply because talented intellectuals from various disciplines gathered to promulgate what is known as the “Medici Effect”. The singular vision of this new journal is to have such a diverse group of intellectuals and scientists gather, without hubris, in order to improve understanding and application of artificial intelligence to transform clinical medicine and healthcare. In short, we aim to inspire everyone to “taste the flight” of artificial and human intelligence as well as clinical medicine in order to solve its many problems while becoming more human and humane.