Unpacking the Black Box in Artificial Intelligence for Medicine

Deep learning will radically change aspects of our medical care. How well do we need to understand how AI tools work? In clinics around the world, a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning is starting to supplement or replace humans in common tasks such as analyzing medical images. Already, at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, "every one of the 50,000 screening mammograms we do every year is processed through our deep learning model, and that information is provided to the radiologist," says Constance Lehman, chief of the hospital's breast imaging division. In deep learning, a subset of a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning, computer models essentially teach themselves to make predictions from large sets of data.