AI is becoming the clinician's new sidekick

THE next time you visit the local hospital for a chest X-ray, scan, or even a check-up, artificial intelligence (AI) could be having more of a role in your health than you might expect. While we are many years away from a completely automated health service, AI can already help clinicians make better decisions and either augment or even replace human judgments in specific areas of healthcare. Researchers at the John Radcliffe Hospital in the UK have developed an AI diagnostics system that is highly accurate in diagnosing heart disease around 80 percent of the time. At Harvard University, researchers have created a microscope that can detect potentially lethal blood infections. Technologically-based systems help physicians by combing through the gigabytes of data available from journals and textbooks, as well as information from real-time clinical practices.