AI in Medicine

AI has embraced medical applications from its inception, and some of the earliest work in successful application of AI technology occurred in medical contexts. Medicine in the twenty-first century will be very different than medicine in the late twentieth century. Fortunately, the technical challenges to AI that emerge are similar, and the prospects for success are high. I have therefore taken the liberty of dividing the last 30 years of medical AI research into three eras: the era of diagnosis, the era of managed care, and the era of molecular medicine. A description of these eras allows me to review for you some of the early and current work in AIM and then tell you about some of the exciting opportunities now emerging. Why is AI in medicine even worth considering? In the late 1950s, medicine was already drawing the attention of computer scientists principally because it contains so many stereotypical reasoning tasks. At the same time, these tasks are fairly structured and so are ...