AI is now better at predicting mortality than human doctors

As scientists continue to toil away at creating machine learning algorithms that will one day enslave humanity save us all, artificial intelligence researchers have discovered that computers are outpacing human doctors in a number of important areas. We've already seen the ability of AI to spot things like cancer, and a new study reveals that a digital brain may also be better at predicting overall mortality and specific conditions such as heart attack with greater accuracy than a trained individual. The research, which was presented at the International Conference on Nuclear Cardiology and Cardiac CT, suggests that we may be fast approaching a day when artificial intelligence works hand-in-hand with medical professionals to anticipate life-threatening problems before they occur. The researchers, led by Dr. Luis Eduardo Juarez-Orozco of the Turku PET Centre in Finland, trained a machine learning algorithm on a data set of nearly 1,000 patients. The data, which spanned six years for each patient, included dozens of variables that the computer had to digest in order to draw correlations between instances of death and heart attack with data on various heart and blood flow readings.