Google ties up with docs to help identify diseases

Tech giant Google has tied up with doctors to give qualified information curated by them to identify diseases based on symptoms, its Senior Vice President - Search and Assistant, Ben Gomes said here on Tuesday.

Interacting with students of his alma mater St Joseph School here, Gomes responded to a question regarding dealing with inaccuracies on the web in diagnosing diseases.

A student Claudius said there were chances that people might be misled into believing that they have dangerous diseases and would be prone to wrong diagnosis based on the information thrown by Google search engine.

In reply, Gomes said, "Actually we have done a lot work on this. So, what we did is we tied up with a lot of doctors to find out what the probability of some symptom, what probably the disease is to get the qualified information." He said the search engine has information curated by doctors, adding, the curated information of very high quality is obtained from doctors at health care company Mayo Clinic and other medical bodies in different countries.

"So people actually get the right sense of the information that they are getting," Gomes told the students and claimed that Google has done a lot of work on getting the right information. Gomes turned nostalgic as he visited the classrooms and spoke to the students in the computer lab.

"It is a pleasure coming back to the school. Things have changed, but the spirit is still the same," he said. He said the students are lucky as they are exposed to computer science early in their lives compared to his school days, where even a calculator was a luxury. He advised students to be always curious. When you have curiosity, follow it. Find more about it.

Don't study anything by rote. Just try and understand what it is. It is not easy sometimes. It is the thing that will stay with you later on.

Understand what it is about and later use it in creative ways," Gomes told students. Gomes was born in Tanzania and raised in Bengaluru.

A student of St Joseph School here, Gomes earned his BA from Case Western University in Ohio and his PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley.