Not only can this rapidly advancing technology improve the speed and accuracy of disease diagnosis and treatment, it has enormous potential to predict health problems, allowing for far more effective prevention programs that target at-risk populations. Dr. Hugo Aerts, Director of the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Program at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, says, "AI can automate assessments and tasks that humans currently can do but take a lot of time." Aerts notes that relying on "a human making an interpretation of an image--say, a radiologist, a dermatologist, a pathologist --that's where we see enormous breakthroughs being made." But despite these successes and benefits, there is reason to be skeptical about early computer models as stand-alone tools for screening cancers or predicting the onset of other diseases. But AI is undeniably improving the practice of medicine by having computers do what humans cannot – crunching huge amounts of data to expedite diagnosis and treatment.

Researchers from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, have developed artificial intelligence (AI) capable of using wearable-collected data to predict the onset of health problems. Findings were published Feb. 23 in the Journal of Applied Physiology. The study aimed to outline a possible foundation for wearable technology and AI could partner to predict illness. Researchers hope the technology pairing could assess changes in aerobic responses to identify the onset of respiratory or cardiovascular disease. "The onset of a lot of chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, has a direct impact on our aerobic fitness," said first author Thomas Beltrame, of the Institute of Computing in University of Campinas in Brazil, and colleagues.