Disease Kinds and Functional Explanations.

The present thesis is concerned with the character of kinds in human somatic pathology and the relation that these kinds and their members have with function-based explanations. More precisely, in the first part of the thesis I investigate whether diseased organisms, grouped together on grounds of their shared pathological features, could form natural kinds, taking into account that the paradigmatic natural kinds are the kinds of the exact sciences. The second part of the thesis has as a backdrop the Humean/anti-Humean debate over causation (and the specific construal of explanations according to which to explain is to pinpoint causes). In this backdrop, I enquire into what sort of function-based explanations we could provide for the symptoms and pathological behaviours exhibited by diseased organisms, if we construe such organisms as members of natural kinds. I argue in the first part of the thesis that from a metaphysical point of view, the organisms dealt with in somatic medicine form natural kinds in the same sense in which we take the kinds dealt with in the exact sciences as natural. By comparing a 'classical', exact science kind with a kind of disease, I show that whatever features are associated with natural kind membership (e. g. involvement in laws or inductions, explanatory relevance, possession of 'essential' properties, instantiation of substantive universals, etc. ) there is no 'ontological gap' between disease kinds and the kinds in the exact sciences. The conclusion that diseases are natural kinds has a certain proviso regarding the question of whether the identity of the individual members of natural kinds is dependent upon their kind membership. Should diseases not be natural kinds, the proviso says, it would be because the properties characteristic of natural kinds must have an identity-influence over the kind members. I present in addition serious problems posed by outlining such identity bearing properties. In the second part of the thesis, I argue that function based explanations concerned with diseased organisms - if we construe such organisms as being members of natural kinds - should illuminate positive causes for the symptoms and pathological behaviours they exhibit. We could obtain such function-based explanations, I suggest, if we interpret the functioning of biological items as the manifesting of causal powers. Against the background of the Humean vs. anti-Humean debate on causation, I show that Nancy Cartwright's capacities are a plausible variant for the powers at work in 'pathological' functioning. I argue that one could track down these capacities if one viewed healthy organisms as nomological machines, in the sense in which Cartwright understands this notion. I also suggest that capacities are necessary in order to vindicate general and, more importantly, singular causal claims involved in medical diagnosis and hence to found satisfactory functional explanations

Mechanisms and Difference-Making

I argue that difference-making should be a crucial element for evaluating the quality of evidence for mechanisms, especially with respect to the robustness of mechanisms, and that it should take central stage when it comes to the general role played by mechanisms in establishing causal claims in medicine. The difference- making of mechanisms should provide additional compelling reasons to accept the gist of Russo-Williamson thesis and include mechanisms in the protocols for Evidence- Based Medicine (EBM), as the EBM+ research group has been advocatin

ImageCLEF 2023 highlight: Multimedia retrieval in medical, social media and content recommendation applications

ECIR 2023. : Advances in Information Retrieval ; 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval, Dublin, Ireland, April 2–6, 2023, Proceedings, Part IIIInternational audienceIn this paper, we provide an overview of the upcoming ImageCLEF campaign. ImageCLEF is part of the CLEF Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum since 2003. ImageCLEF, the Multimedia Retrieval task in CLEF, is an ongoing evaluation initiative that promotes the evaluation of technologies for annotation, indexing, and retrieval of multimodal data with the aim of providing information access to large collections of data in various usage scenarios and domains. In its 21stedition, ImageCLEF 2023 will have four main tasks: (i) a Medical task addressing automatic image captioning, synthetic medical images created with GANs, Visual Question Answering for colonoscopy images, and medical dialogue summarization; (ii) an Aware task addressing the prediction of real-life consequences of online photo sharing; (iii) a Fusion task addressing late fusion techniques based on the expertise of a pool of classifiers; and (iv) a Recommending task addressing cultural heritage content-recommendation. In 2022, ImageCLEF received the participation of over 25 groups submitting more than 258 runs. These numbers show the impact of the campaign. With the COVID-19 pandemic now over, we expect that the interest in participating, especially at the physical CLEF sessions, will increase significantly in 202

The causal explanatory functions of medical diagnoses

Diagnoses in medicine are often taken to serve as explanations of patients’ symptoms and signs. This article examines how they do so. I begin by arguing that although some instances of diagnostic explanation can be formulated as covering law arguments, they are explanatory neither in virtue of their argumentative structures nor in virtue of general regularities between diagnoses and clinical presentations. I then consider the theory that medical diagnoses explain symptoms and signs by identifying their actual causes in particular cases. While I take this to be largely correct, I argue that for a diagnosis to function as a satisfactory causal explanation of a patient’s symptoms and signs, it also needs to be supplemented by understanding the mechanisms by which the identified cause produces the symptoms and signs. This mechanistic understanding comes not from the diagnosis itself, but rather from the theoretical framework within which the physician operates