The AI Advantage Clinicians are getting smart new virtual partners to improve care
U .S. News & World Report interviewed
Keith Dreyer, chief data science of- ficer of Partners HealthCare and vice chairman of radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, to get his perspective on the extraor- dinary impact artificial intelligence will have on health care in coming years. electronic health records for many thousands of people and identify biomarkers or other data to make predictions, for example, about patients’ likelihood of getting a disease. Patients with no prior history of diabetes, say, might have certain characteristics that put them on a path to the disease. So you could steer them to preventa- tive care. Another area where AI can benefit patients is precision medicine. For example, it What exactly is artificial intelligence, turns out diabetes has five or more types. With and what will it mean to health care? data science you can tease out a lot of informa- The formal term we use is data science. That in- tion about how people with a specific type might cludes artificial intelligence and machine learning – the science of react to different therapeutics and tailor treatments that will getting computers to act without being programmed by humans. work best for each patient. Data science will also help in the Currently, scientists can pick a specific type of machine-learning laboratory in areas like pathology and genomics – anything that algorithm (basically a step-by-step mathematical process that requires large amounts of data to be analyzed for discovery. tells a computer what to do) and then train it to handle a certain task. One such algorithm is called a neural network because it Should doctors and nurses be worried can learn and improve performance on its own like the human about their jobs? brain, but it can work much faster. Collectively, these powerful You can’t replace the comfort of human-to-human interaction, tools will one day help us find disease almost before a patient is but in the near future doctors using AI will win out over those symptomatic, treat it early, and achieve a higher survival rate that don’t in terms of delivering the best care. AI and machine with much less patient suffering and at far less cost. learning will be critical in helping clinicians by aggregating and analyzing maybe thousands of data points for a particular patient How is AI being used now? (like lab results, genomics, imaging) to identify key conditions One key way is with diagnostic and imaging tools, like MRIs the doctor needs to manage, from pulmonary disease to conges- and CT and PET scans. Algorithms can be trained, for instance, tive heart failure. So instead of clinicians being overwhelmed to accurately measure all of the lymph nodes from a cancer by data, they now have an AI partner to process and interpret patient’s CT scan to see if they’re changing size. It’s a huge the information and even advise them on treatment options. job that algorithms can do much more quickly than humans. The clinician can then take the results and decide whether How fast will these changes happen? a therapeutic regime is working or needs to be adjusted or Incrementally. To put an algorithm into wide clinical practice, changed. We now also use machine-learning tools in stroke you have to collect and structure data to train the algorithm. detection and classification. We can train an algorithm to learn Then you need to get FDA regulatory approval. Finally you need to assess thousands of data points covering the range of strokes to figure out how to deploy that solution in clinical practice to and how each can be characterized. Over time, the algorithm providers using different electronic health records. And that’s learns how to read images with a high degree of accuracy. For just one algorithm. We might eventually need thousands in radi- example, the computer might say the patient had a hemor- ology alone. For now, we focus on solving narrow problems like rhagic stroke. Then the neuroradiologist and neurologist will detecting lung or breast cancers. We’re going to see big successes, determine whether surgery or medication is needed to treat it. but change won’t seem dramatic at first. People in the field all say that in time we will no longer talk about artificial intelligence, but Where else is data science having an impact? rather a smarter “something” – a smarter cellphone, a smarter Population health management is one area. You can look at CT scanner, a smarter stethoscope – or a smarter physician. l
28 U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT COURTESY OF KEITH DREYER
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