Translating Artificial Intelligence Into Clinical Care

Artificial intelligence has become a frequent topic in the news cycle, with reports of breakthroughs in speech recognition, computer vision, and textual understanding that have made their way into a bevy of products and services that are used every day. In contrast, clinical care has yet to reach the much lower bar of automating health care information transactions in the form of electronic health records. Medical leaders in the 1960s and 1970s were already speculating about the opportunities to bring automated inference methods to patient care,1 but the methods and data had not yet reached the critical mass needed to achieve those goals. The intellectual roots of "deep learning," which power the commodity and consumer implementations of present-day artificial intelligence, were planted even earlier in the 1940s and 1950s with the development of "artificial neural network" algorithms.2,3 These algorithms, as their name suggests, are very loosely based on the way in which the brain's web of neurons adaptively becomes rewired in response to external stimuli to perform learning and pattern recognition.