A patient presents to KBCB with certain symptoms, and he will use the patient's

history, symptoms, and other factors to form a differential diagnosis. But just
because symptom X is indicative of disease Y, it doesn't mean he's found Y -- th
ere can be MANY diseases that are indicated by symptom X*. So he orders further
tests to either confirm or rule out his differential diagnosis.
[*Also guided by
t of an atypical
a rare disease.
reets of London,

heuristics, such as a symptom being more likely to be the resul

presentation of a common disease than a typical presentation of
Or as Sherlock Holmes put it, when you hear hoofsteps on the st
you think horse, not zebra.]

An MRI is one such test that may be indicated, and as I said above, it's a sophi
sticated process of data gathering, algorithmic analysis, and visualization that
are then presented to him (or the radiologist) as the SME to interpret, and the
n it's also up to him as the SME to determine what to do about it.
This really is not that much different from basketball analytics. We have a symp
tom -- say, we're loosing too many close games in the last minute. We make a dif
ferential diagnosis -- say, maybe we're launching the semipenultimate shot at th
e wrong time in two-for-one situations. We order a test -- let's say we analyze
the raw SportsVU data for thousands of games looking for two-for-one situations,
looking at the time the semipenultimate shot was launched. We then group this d
ata by the specific time of this shot, and calculate the average net points that
result. For fun we might even visualize this -- forming a graph which as it tur
ns out is bell-shaped with a mean of around 30.5 seconds. (Or more realistically
, we probably already have this available so we know what an optimal two-for-one
SHOULD look like, just as KBCB already knows what a clear MRI should look like)
. So now we apply this knowledge to our patient (the basketball team) looking sp
ecifically at what they are doing in this situation with the best diagnostic too
l at our disposal (the SportsVU data). The information goes to a SME, who notice
s that our team is launching its semipenultimate shots roughly three seconds lat
er than optimal, with an average loss of 1.2 net points, which for this team wou
ld translate to three additional losses over the course of a season.
So now we order an intervention, which in the case of the basketball team would
be working with the coaching staff to understand the situation and show how it c
an be improved. The coaching staff devises drills to simulate these situations a
nd get the team used to launching these shots a little sooner. Over time, this b
ecomes second nature, repeated analytics of post-intervention play shows that th
e team is now launching its semipenultimate shot at an average of 30.1 seconds,
and the team has seen a net gain of 1.1 points in these situations. Finally, the
analytics guy gets a raise.