Deconstructing the diagnostic reasoning of human versus artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to occupy an increasingly important place in diagnostic tasks in health care. The principles underlying learning are similar for human and artificial intelligences, but the respective approaches to diagnosis are markedly different. Clinicians approach diagnosis in an intuitive and deductive manner, whereas AI is chiefly analytical and inductive. The wholesale replacement of human intelligence by AI in diagnostic tasks is unlikely, apart from some highly targeted tasks; instead, AI should be considered as a tool to help clinicians in their reasoning. Artificial intelligence (AI) is often presented as the future of medical practice.