麻豆传媒

Diagnosing an illness requires taking in a lot of information and connecting the dots.聽Artificial intelligence聽may be well-suited to such a task and聽in recent tests one system could diagnose聽children鈥檚聽illnesses better than some doctors.

Kang Zhang at the University of California in San Diego and his colleagues trained an AI on medical records from 1.3 million patient visits at a major medical centre in Guangzhou, China. The patients were all under 18 years old and visited their doctor between January 2016 and January 2017.

Their medical charts include聽text written by doctors and laboratory test results. To help the AI, Zhang and his team had human doctors annotate medical records to identify portions of text associated with the child鈥檚 complaint, their history of illness, and laboratory tests.

When tested on previously unseen cases, the AI could diagnose聽glandular fever (also known as mononucleosis), roseola, influenza, chicken pox and hand-foot-mouth disease聽with between 90 and 97 per cent accuracy. It鈥檚 not perfect, but neither are human doctors, says Zhang.

鈥淲hen you鈥檙e busy you can see 80 patients a day. And you can only grasp so much information. That鈥檚 where we potentially as human physicians might make mistakes. AI doesn鈥檛 have to sleep, it has a large memory and doesn鈥檛 lose energy,鈥� he says.

The team compared the model鈥檚 accuracy to that of 20 paediatricians with varying years of experience. It outperformed the junior paediatricians, though the senior ones did better than the AI.

The AI could be used to triage patients in emergency departments. 鈥淕iven sufficient data, AI should be able to tell if this is an urgent situation and needs referral or if it鈥檚 a cold,鈥� says Zhang.

Chris Russell at the Alan Turing Institute in London says this won鈥檛 let people bypass doctors entirely when seeking medical treatment, because these medical records still need to be created by trained professionals, and their knowledge is key to the diagnosis.聽鈥淪omeone needs to be there discussing your symptoms and putting them into the machine. I don鈥檛 see how this technology could be used to take doctors out of the loop. It could be used to聽help them, but it鈥檚 a very long way from replacing medical professionals,鈥� he says.

It鈥檚 possible聽that junior doctors who may rely on AI like this to make diagnoses could聽miss out on learning how to see patterns in patient complaints. And people may feel uncomfortable with this type of medical care. 鈥淚f it鈥檚 deployed as an interface directly with the person where they type in their symptoms, I can see how people would be very uncomfortable with this. When you go see a doctor, you want to feel like there鈥檚 someone there who cares about you,鈥� Russell says.

鈥淏ut you don鈥檛 want to go to the emergency room and wait 5 hours because you have some pain in the abdomen that鈥檚 not appendicitis but just related to gastroenteritis or the food you ate. All those diseases have tell-tale signs, and just as we physicians ask a series of questions to drive a diagnosis, AI can do the same,鈥� says Zhang.

He and his team are now training the AI to diagnose adult diseases, as well.