Prognosis: AI

A three-dimensional printout of a human heart is seen at the Heidelberg University Hospital (Universitaetsklinikum Heidelberg) in Heidelberg, Germany, August 14, 2018. If artificial intelligence (AI) has a big say in what we should watch next on YouTube or any other multimedia streaming platform, then perhaps it can also recommend what we should eat or drink next--or more likely not eat or drink next--to stay in the best of health. Already the applications of AI are going beyond tips for maintaining a healthy lifestyle, and AI-powered software is becoming an integral part of some medical diagnosis procedures. Thanks to deep learning algorithms and neural networks, AI solutions have become very good at pattern recognition, which after all, lies at the core of what a human doctor does for figuring out the root cause of a patient's ailment. Doctors, in essence, examine all the symptoms a patient is exhibiting--often with the help of medical imaging, bloodwork, and pathological tests--and then compare the systems with the telltale signs of likely diseases and conditions that they have learned about as medical students or cases that they have come across in the medical literature.