AI can diagnose childhood illnesses better than some doctors

Diagnosing an illness requires taking in a lot of information and connecting the dots. Artificial intelligence may be well-suited to such a task and in recent tests one system could diagnose children's illnesses better than some doctors. Kang Zhang at the University of California in San Diego and his colleagues trained an AI on medical records from 1.3 million patient visits at a major medical centre in Guangzhou, China. The patients were all under 18 years old and visited their doctor between January 2016 and January 2017. Their medical charts include text written by doctors and laboratory test results.