High-tech partnership refines artificial intelligence in health care

AI could generate insights into how an individual's ethnicity, age, gender, occupation and other factors could be linked to their health. When researchers trained an artificial intelligence (AI) system to use radiological images to distinguish patients with COVID-19 pneumonia from those with other respiratory diseases, the machine found a logical – but faulty – short cut. A radiologist would weigh up features of the images. "But the AI system learned to read the dates of the scan," says Antonio Esposito, professor of radiology at Vita Salute San Raffaele University in Milan. The computer, he explains, simply put all patients who entered the hospital in 2020 into the COVID-19 category.