Artificial Intelligence and Family Medicine: Better Together

摘要

According to futurists, the artificial intel-ligence (AI) revolution in health care ishere. 1 While trending now, the conceptis not new and was first introduced 70 yearsago when Alan Turing described “thinking ma-chines.” 2 John McCarthy later coined the term“AI” to denote the idea of getting a computerto do things which, when done by people, aresaid to involve intelligence. 3 What is new isthe digitization of everything from electronichealth records (EHRs) to genes and microbi-omes, which provide the data that AI needsto learn. This conversion of images, handwrit-ten notes, and pathology slides into 1’s and0’s allows machines to perform a wide rangeof tasks, such as detecting retinopathy, skincancer, and lung nodules. 4-6 Even though thissurge of available data exceeds what individu-als and teams can realistically manage, com-puters have learned how to process these datato predict outcomes important to our patients,including opioid misuse, emergency depart-ment visits, and deaths. 7-9 Advances like theseled Andy Conrad, the CEO of Google’s life sci-ences subsidiary, to declare that in medicine,“the most important tool is the computer.”