AI is able to spot diseases before symptoms appear

This article is an installment of Future Explored, a weekly guide to world-changing technology. You can get stories like this one straight to your inbox every Thursday morning by subscribing here. Patient outcomes are almost always better when a disease is diagnosed and treated early, but some illnesses don't trigger symptoms until a patient is already really sick -- ovarian cancer, for example, can go undetected for 10 years or more, giving it time to spread to other organs. By screening healthy patients for these sneaky diseases, doctors can spot them earlier -- and new artificial intelligence (AI) tools promise to help in the hunt. The challenge: Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) kill nearly 18 million people every year, making them the leading cause of death worldwide.