The Role of AI in Health Care

The potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to transform every aspect of our world is becoming increasingly evident, perhaps nowhere more so than health care. AI has the power to efficiently process data far beyond our own capacity, reducing the burden on health care providers and freeing up more time for patient engagement. The real power of AI to transform health care, however, may lie in the use of “supervised learning” to create deep learning models and neural networks that can find patterns that humans can’t see. Some of these patterns, derived from huge datasets, can detect diseases like cancer much earlier than is possible now, and can predict risk far better. This can potentially translate to thousands of lives saved.

But the promise of AI does not come without challenges, especially in health care. How much of what we hear is hype, how much is fear of change, and what are the real risks involved? Can AI that is developed in one part of the country be safely used in another with different patient populations? What can we do to prevent or remediate bias? Drawing on current, real-world examples in areas like patient diagnosis and treatment, mortality and disease progression prediction, and radiographic imaging, this presentation will provide answers to these questions and illustrate how AI is already being used to transform the health care sector.