Can AI Help Fight Cancer? - AI Summary

Not only can this rapidly advancing technology improve the speed and accuracy of disease diagnosis and treatment, it has enormous potential to predict health problems, allowing for far more effective prevention programs that target at-risk populations. Dr. Hugo Aerts, Director of the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Program at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, says, "AI can automate assessments and tasks that humans currently can do but take a lot of time." Aerts notes that relying on "a human making an interpretation of an image--say, a radiologist, a dermatologist, a pathologist --that's where we see enormous breakthroughs being made." But despite these successes and benefits, there is reason to be skeptical about early computer models as stand-alone tools for screening cancers or predicting the onset of other diseases. But AI is undeniably improving the practice of medicine by having computers do what humans cannot – crunching huge amounts of data to expedite diagnosis and treatment.