AI learns to predict deadly heart attacks better than doctors & researchers aren't quite sure how

Researchers led by Brandon Fornwalt at the Pennsylvania-based Geisinger Health System put their machine learning model to work studying the results of some 1.8 million electrocardiogram (ECG) heart scans, hoping the neural network would derive patterns from the heaps of data. Predicting the risk of a heart attack or other heart-related issues, the AI performed better than its human counterparts, consistently scoring above flesh-and-blood doctors. Even for ECG results that cardiologists determined to be normal, the AI was able to pick up on other patterns and accurately predict fatal health risks within a year's time. "That finding suggests that the model is seeing things that humans probably can't see, or at least that we just ignore and think are normal," Fornwalt said. AI can potentially teach us things that we've been maybe misinterpreting for decades.