It's too soon to tell if DeepMind's medical AI will save any lives

Artificial intelligence trained on health records can now detect kidney injury up to two days before it occurs. The idea is that an advance warning could help doctors intervene earlier to prevent irreversible damage to the kidneys. AIs are already touted as rivals to doctors when it comes to detecting medical conditions such as certain cancers and childhood illnesses. But few undergo rigorous clinical trials, so it's still too early to know whether they are effective in practice. Nenad Tomašev at DeepMind and colleagues trained an algorithm to predict the likelihood that a person who was admitted to hospital would go on to develop acute kidney injury (AKI). They trained the AI using de-identified electronic health records from 703,782 US veterans aged between 18 and 90, who were admitted to hospital between October 2011 and September 2015.