AI can identify dangerous lung diseases as well as trained doctors

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is starting to make a dent in the multi-trillion dollar healthcare industry, from being able to identify cancers and healthcare issues with just a glance, to being able to decipher the mysteries of the human genome and figure out how much longer you have left to live, but now it has a new trick. In a new arXiv paper published by the researchers from Stanford University, who also trained their smart watches to identify when you're getting ill, the team behind the newest AI addition to healthcare explain how CheXNet, their Convolutional Neural Network achieved the feat. CheXNet was trained on a publicly available data set of more than 100,000 chest X-Rays that were annotated with information on at least fourteen different diseases. The team then had four Radiologists go through a test set of X-Rays and make diagnoses, and these were compared to the diagnoses performed by CheXNet. Not only did CheXNet beat the Radiologists at spotting Pneumonia, but once the algorithm was expanded, it proved better at identifying the other thirteen diseases as well.