Artificial intelligence and the future of medicine

Washington University researchers are working to develop artificial intelligence (AI) systems for health care, which have the potential to transform the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, helping to ensure that patients get the right treatment at the right time. In a new Viewpoint article published Dec. 10 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), two AI experts at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis--Philip Payne, the Robert J. Terry Professor and director of the Institute for Informatics; and Thomas M. Maddox, MD, a professor of medicine and director of the Health Systems Innovation Lab--discuss the best uses for AI in health care and outline some of the challenges for implementing the technology in hospitals and clinics. In health care, artificial intelligence relies on the power of computers to sift through and make sense of reams of electronic data about patients--such as their ages, medical histories, health status, test results, medical images, DNA sequences, and many other sources of health information. AI excels at the complex identification of patterns in these reams of data, and it can do this at a scale and speed beyond human capacity. The hope is that this technology can be harnessed to help doctors and patients make better health-care decisions.