A chatbot symptom checker developed in Israel performs better than seven rival products, according to an independent study. Symptom checkers use AI to simulate a conversation with a doctor, and provide a more accurate diagnosis than Googling a series of symptoms. However, physicians are skeptical to trust them, as they were designed to be used by patients rather than by doctors making diagnoses. A new study published in the International Journal of Medical Informatics (IJMI) found that Israeli-based Kahun gathered the best and most relevant insights. The researchers assessed the data-gathering capabilities of eight chatbot symptom checkers – K Health, Babylon, ADA, Buoy, Kahun, Mediktor, Symptomae, and Your.MD.

New York, July 14: A centralised repository of COVID-19 health records built by US researchers, last year, has been helpful in tracing the progression of the disease over time and could eventually be used as the basis for decision-making tools. The National COVID-19 Cohort Collaborative (N3C) is a centralised, harmonised, high-granularity electronic health record repository that is the largest, most representative COVID-19 cohort to date. 'Treatment With Blood Thinners May Reduce Death in COVID-19 Patients', Says Study This multicenter data set can support robust evidence-based development of predictive and diagnostic tools and inform clinical care and policy, said a team of researchers from those including at Universities of Colorado, Michigan, Rochester Medical Center, and Johns Hopkins. The cohort study, published in the JAMA Network, used data from 34 medical centers and included over 1 million adults -- 174,568 who tested positive for COVID-19 and 1,133,848 who tested negative between January 2020 and December 2020. "This cohort study found that COVID-19 mortality decreased over time during 2020 and that patient demographic characteristics and comorbidities were associated with higher clinical severity," said Tellen D. Bennett, from Department of Pediatrics at Colorado's School of Medicine.

Artificial intelligence has gone from science-fiction fantasy to imminent component of the future in the space of just a few decades, with many of the fictitious genre's predictions inching closer and closer to reality. One such foreshadowing short story was Philip K. Dick's The Minority Report, which was later made into a feature film directed by Steven Spielberg. In that tale, three mutant beings called "precogs" are able to foretell criminal behavior before it actually happens. The only problem is that they don't always agree, creating an idea about what will happen based on what the "majority report" dictates. Placing faith in their educated guesses, the mutants tell law enforcement what a person will do -- before that person knows themselves.