Leading the AI charge

While certain aspects of healthcare aren’t expected to feel the effects of artificial intelligence (AI) for some time, radiology is often cited as an area that will first feel its impact. Dr. Mark Michalski, Executive Director of the MGH & BWH Center for Clinical Data Science, recently weighed in on why he feels radiologists are uniquely positioned to advance AI in an interview for GE Healthcare’s The Pulse news website. In the interview, Michalski stated that the most recent advances in machine learning—such as deep learning—work very well with image and video data, so radiology and other specialties that use image data (like pathology, dermatology, ophthalmology, or radiation oncology and others) have been among the first impacted. Beyond this, radiology has a relatively well-structured set of data, which is the foundation for building machine intelligence. Michalski also noted that the radiology community already has made significant investments in IT and tech infrastructure—it is generally familiar with high tech systems (like scanners, integrations with EHRs, etc.), making adoption and integration of machine learning technologies perhaps easier.