2019 Innovation Issue: Hospitals move cautiously into AI

Take a look around any big hospital and you'll find plenty of imposing technology: surgical robots, artificial organs, wireless brain sensors, three-dimensional imaging visualizations. But you have to look harder to find what's been touted for years as the future of medicine: artificial intelligence, or the use of computers to reason, learn and make critical decisions in patient care, with little or no human involvement. The medical field's lofty dreams of unleashing the power of artificial intelligence to transform medicine have yet to materialize in a major way. The thought of replacing doctors with machines remains a science-fiction fantasy. Even so, health-information experts say artificial intelligence has its place and can perform valuable tasks, from helping doctors identify diseases earlier to matching call-center customers at an insurance company with the person most qualified to help.