Artificial Intelligence, which has already had a major impact on industries such as transportation, retail, energy, and banking, is only just beginning to be applied in medicine. Its profound capabilities hold promise for enabling early detection of disease and metabolic abnormalities and hope for empowering doctors and patients.
Using AI to Invent New Medical Tests
Artificial Intelligence, which has already had a major impact on industries such as transportation, retail, energy, and banking, is only just beginning to be applied in medicine. Its profound capabilities hold promise for enabling early detection of disease and metabolic abnormalities and hope for empowering doctors and patients. The great advantage of AI is its unique ability to integrate large volumes of data and identify patterns that may be subtle or difficult for humans to recognize. These subtle patterns have a huge potential to alert clinicians to important physiologic changes that need to be addressed. That is why the Mayo Clinic turned to the power of AI to invent a new way of detecting fluctuations of blood potassium levels that patients could easily perform at home without drawing blood. It is now preparing to submit the technology to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for approval. This initiative to create a “bloodless blood test” offers insights into the process of creating AI-driven solutions that directly address an unmet patient or clinician need — insights that hopefully others interested in harnessing the power of AI in health care will find useful.