VICTIMS of domestic abuse can hide the truth from doctors, but they leave clues in their medical records that a computer program has now learned to follow.
Ben Reis of Harvard Medical School and his colleagues worked with six years’ worth of medical histories for 561,000 people, 19,000 of whom were known to have been abused. Their program searched two-thirds of these records for differences between the histories of abused people and the rest, and then produced rules for distinguishing the groups.
The rules mainly looked at patterns of injuries and bouts of mental illness – signs of…
