AI just as effective as clinicians in diagnostics, study suggests

Artificial intelligence has the potential to be deeply disruptive across the healthcare sector, especially in cutting down administrative waste, streamlining billing, and improving patient matching and population health management. Tech giants like Amazon, Google and Intel are leveraging their hefty AI capabilities as they move into healthcare, and providers and payers become more open to the technology. However, AI's value add in diagnostics, a realm dogged with variability, is unproven though much-hyped among investors and the public. University Hospitals Birmingham NHS researchers vetted more than 20,500 articles published between 2012 and 2019, but only ended up including 1% of them in their meta-analysis. The included studies spanned breast cancer, orthopaedic trauma, respiratory disease, cardiology, facial surgery and more. Of the 82 articles researchers looked at, only 25 validated the AI models externally by using medical images from a different population, and just 14 directly compared clinician and AI diagnostic abilities side by side.