How IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

After its triumph on Jeopardy!, IBM’s AI seemed poised to revolutionize medicine. Doctors are still waiting Illustration: Eddie Guy In 2014, IBM opened swanky new headquarters for its artificial intelligence division, known as IBM Watson. Inside the glassy tower in lower Manhattan, IBMers can bring prospective clients and visiting journalists into the “immersion room,” which resembles a miniature planetarium. There, in the darkened space, visitors sit on swiveling stools while fancy graphics flash around the curved screens covering the walls. It’s the closest you can get, IBMers sometimes say, to being inside Watson’s electronic brain. One dazzling 2014 demonstration of Watson’s brainpower showed off its potential to transform medicine using AI—a goal that IBM CEO Virginia Rometty often calls the company’s moon shot. In the demo, Watson took a bizarre collection of patient symptoms and came up with a list of possible diagnoses, each annotated with Watson’s confidence level and links to Continue reading How IBM Watson Overpromised and Underdelivered on AI Health Care

The First Frontier for Medical AI Is the Pathology Lab

But before adopting startup PathAI’s tools, doctors must see if they are worth the cost Illustration: Carl De Torres This is how a pathologist could save your life. Imagine you’re coughing up blood, and a chest scan reveals a suspicious mass in your lungs. A surgeon removes a small cylindrical sample from the potential tumor, and the pathologist places very thin slices of the tissue on glass slides. After preserving and staining the tissue, the pathologist peers through a microscope and sees that the cells have the telltale signs of lung cancer. You start treatment before the tumor spreads and grows. And this is how a pathologist could kill you: The expert physician would just have to miss the cancer. Or, more likely, misclassify the cells viewed on the slides as the wrong cancer subtype. Rather than getting a targeted therapy that beats your cancer into remission, you receive conventional chemo Continue reading The First Frontier for Medical AI Is the Pathology Lab

“Unorthodox” AI Helps Identify Best Cancer Treatments

The self-learning model identifies drug regimens that shrink tumors while minimizing side effects AlphaGo became the first household AI name by teaching itself to play the ancient Chinese game Go and then beating the world’s best human player. Self-driving cars use AI systems to learn to park or merge into traffic by practicing the maneuvers over and over until they get it right. It’s clear that AI programs are good at training themselves to win, maximize, or perfect. But what if success means striking a balance? In cancer treatments, doctors endeavor to dose patients with enough drugs to kill as many tumor cells as possible but as few patient cells as possible. In other words, they balance shrinking a tumor with minimizing side effects. “We said, ‘Wait. This sounds like a machine-learning search problem and optimization issue,’ ” says Pratik Shah, an MIT Media Lab principal investigator. “We thought we could do Continue reading “Unorthodox” AI Helps Identify Best Cancer Treatments

AI Cardiologist Aces Its First Medical Exam

A neural network outperforms human cardiologists in a task involving heart scans Photo-illustration: Rima Arnaout Rima Arnaout wants to be clear: The AI she created to analyze heart scans, which easily outperformed human experts on its task, is not ready to replace cardiologists.  It was a limited task, she notes, just the first step in what a cardiologist does when evaluating an echocardiogram (the image produced by bouncing sound waves off the heart). “The best technique is still inside the head of the trained echocardiographer,” she says. But with experimental artificial intelligence systems making such rapid progress in the medical realm, particularly on tasks involving medical images, Arnaout does see the potential for big changes in her profession. And when her 10-year-old cousin expressed the desire to be a radiologist when she grows up, Arnaout had some clear advice: “I told her that she should learn to code,” she says Continue reading AI Cardiologist Aces Its First Medical Exam

Cracking Open the Black Box of AI with Cell Biology

A deep neural network that’s mapped to the innards of a yeast cell reveals its inner workings Image: iStock Phot The deep neural networks that power today’s artificial intelligence systems work in mysterious ways. They’re black boxes: A question goes in (“Is this a photo of a cat?” “What’s the best next move in this game of Go?” “Should this self-driving car accelerate at this yellow light?”), and an answer comes out the other side. We may not know exactly how a black box AI system works, but we know that it does work. But a new study that mapped a neural network to the components within a simple yeast cell allowed researchers to watch the AI system at work. And it gave them insights into cell biology in the process. The resulting tech could help in the quest for new cancer drugs and personalized treatments.  First, let’s cover the basics Continue reading Cracking Open the Black Box of AI with Cell Biology