This AI knows when you'll die and its creators don't know how

Researchers from Pennsylvania healthcare provider Geisinger have trained an AI to predict which patients are at a higher risk of dying within the next year, New Scientist reports. They fed the AI 1.77 million electrocardiogram (ECG) logs -- measured in voltage over time -- from 400,000 patients, in order to detect patterns that could indicate future cardiac problems including heart attacks and atrial fibrillation. The results were impressive and a little scary. The AI model performed better than existing methods, according to the researchers, at distinguishing between patients who would die within a year and those who survived. "No matter what, the voltage-based model was always better than any model you could build out of things that we already measure from an ECG," Brandon Fornwalt, lead researcher of the study at Geisinger, told New Scientist.