Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a crucial component of healthcare to help augment physicians and make them more efficient. In medical imaging, it is helping radiologists more efficiently manage PACS worklists, enable structured reporting, auto detect injuries and diseases, and to pull in relevant prior exams and patient data. In cardiology, AI is helping automate tasks and measurements on imaging and in reporting systems, guides novice echo users to improve imaging and accuracy, and can risk stratify patients. AI includes deep learning algorithms, machine learning, computer-aided detection (CAD) systems, and convolutional neural networks. 

Elon Musk’s Neuralink has healthcare AI on the brain

Musk has his eye on medical applications to get the fledgling company rolling—and he sees AI playing a major supporting role from its outset.

AI–spectroscopy combo rats out fentanyl and its illicit kin

Researchers have developed an AI algorithm that can identify illegally cooked-up fentanyl, teaching itself to spot dangerous new impostors as it goes.

4 ways AI may change plastic surgery

It has a ways to go in the field, but AI promises to modernize plastic surgery along both its main branches, cosmetic and reconstructive.

Photo-fed AI can tell your dietician what’s on your plate

If it pans out at real-world dinner tables, a freshly cooked-up AI system will soon be counting calories and sniffing out macronutrients just by gobbling up images of meals.

Google and Harvard team up against COVID

Pandemic forecasting models aren’t hard to find of late, but a new one combines epidemiological expertise from a top-three medical school with AI knowhow from one of big tech’s biggest.

Major new digital health center quickly taking shape

One state’s largest health system is combining forces with that state’s top medical school to launch a multidisciplinary digital health center that’s notable for its apparent velocity out of the gate.

$17.5K up for grabs in online blockchain hackathon with COVID in its sights

A blockchain startup headquartered in the British Virgin Islands is organizing a global, healthcare-specific online hackathon with a prize pool of 15,000 euros, or around $17,500.

Tattoo you: Medical monitors can now be drawn on the skin with pencil and paper

Engineers have come up with a way to place paper-thin sensors on the skin using literal paper. The kind you use in your copy machine will do.

Around the web

Compensation for heart specialists continues to climb. What does this say about cardiology as a whole? Could private equity's rising influence bring about change? We spoke to MedAxiom CEO Jerry Blackwell, MD, MBA, a veteran cardiologist himself, to learn more.

The American College of Cardiology has shared its perspective on new CMS payment policies, highlighting revenue concerns while providing key details for cardiologists and other cardiology professionals. 

As debate simmers over how best to regulate AI, experts continue to offer guidance on where to start, how to proceed and what to emphasize. A new resource models its recommendations on what its authors call the “SETO Loop.”