What is this about?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is able to make a pretty accurate guess at how much longer you've got to live, as shown by a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports.
In the the first study of its kind, scientists from the University of Adelaide used AI to predict which patients would die within the next five years with 69 percent accuracy – that’s about the same as an estimation made by a trained medical doctor.
The AI was fed CT imagery of 48 people's chests and then used machine learning techniques to sift through the huge amount of data and draw out any anomalies or strange patterns. A total of 15,957 biomarker features were found within the images and then used to make an estimation of their remaining life.
Why is this useful?
Predicting the future of a patient is useful because it may enable doctors to tailor treatments to the individual. The accurate assessment of biological age and the prediction of a patient's longevity has so far been limited by doctors’ inability to look inside the body and measure the health of each organ.
The next stage of the research will attempt to increase the AI’s accuracy by giving it tens of thousands of images to process.
This study suggests that the computer has learnt to recognize the complex imaging appearances of diseases, something that requires extensive training for human experts.
Instead of focusing on diagnosing diseases, the automated systems can predict medical outcomes in a way that doctors are not trained to do, by incorporating large volumes of data and detecting subtle patterns.
This study opens new avenues for the application of artificial intelligence technology in medical image analysis, and could offer new hope for the early detection of serious illness, requiring specific medical interventions.
AI is set for big things in the field of biomedicine with its ability to hyper-efficiently process large amounts of data. For example, researchers from Stanford University have developed an artificial intelligence that is as accurate as doctors at identifying skin cancer from images.
AI offers big changes for medicine as we know it. There is enough reason to be truly excited.
For further information:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-01931-w
http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/ai-can-predict-how-much-longer-you-have-left-to-live/