Artificial intelligence (AI) far too often pops up as a term used vaguely to refer to any process that appears to involve more computers than it did twenty years ago. But concrete examples of how this informatics technology can improve fields like life sciences are harder to come by. I recently spoke to Krishnan Nandabalan, founder, CEO and president of InveniAI, which aims to use AI techniques to more quickly identify pharmacological compounds and get drugs to patients faster, to get the full picture. Ruairi Mackenzie (RM): How would you like to set the record straight about AI in the life sciences? Krishnan Nandabalan (KN): AI is used as a buzzword now.

TechRepublic's Karen Roby talked with Dr. Krishnan Nandabalan of InveniAI about the ways artificial intelligence (AI) is helping companies discover new medications. The following is an edited transcript of their interview. Krishnan Nandabalan: AI could be considered as a force multiplier. If you look at the amount of data that the world has been gathering for the past few years, it kind of doubles every two years now, and if you take the medical field, especially on a daily basis, more than 5,000 publications are being added. It's humanly impossible to actually keep track of all of these things, and seeing which of them are relevant to you in your specific area of investigational research, and what is not.

Among the many examples of Artificial Intelligence, AI in healthcare is clearly one of the leaders. AI is already reshaping medicine in many ways, and its influence will only increase in the years ahead. To shed light on this major shift, I spoke with Dr. Krishnan Nandabalan, founder and CEO of InveniAI, an AI healthcare company based in Connecticut. See below for transcribed highlights of "AI and Healthcare" with Krishnan Nandabalan. "One of the major areas where a lot of investment is being noticed is in robotics-assisted surgery, typically in microsurgery. Now, here is a field where it's natural extension of the AI capabilities. So, that allows you to actually use robotics more efficiently when you're performing a bypass surgery or some very, a microsurgery in the brain which needs a high deal of precision. You still need the experienced surgeon out there to make sure that everything is being done right but, now, instead of human hands, you can have a very precise machine that'll be doing the job for you. "Some of the novel treatments and deep brain stimulation in Parkinson's, for example, is being done using these techniques.