Catdiology? Cat pictures are helping AI get better at recognizing X-rays

It's easy to joke that the internet was invented to give people around the world the opportunity to share pictures of cats. However, according to a new report, those kitty pictures may one day turn out to save your life. That is based on work being done by Dr. Alvin Rajkomar, an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center. Rajkomar trained a deep learning neural network to be able to automatically detect life-threatening abnormalities in chest X-rays. "When I was a medical resident, I ordered a stat X-ray of a patient who I suspected had a life-threatening pneumothorax -- air outside of his lung compressing his heart -- and happened to be standing next to the digital X-ray machine as it was being taken," he told Digital Trends.