A new piece of medical software's first job will be to offer a second opinion on conclusions drawn by human doctors in Toronto, but the days of Artificial Intelligence making medical diagnoses are likely not far off. Toronto’s University Health Network is teaming up with researchers at the University of Waterloo and the Vector Institute to develop the program, which can read and provide feedback on medical images like x-rays and ultrasounds.
So how does the it work? What problems does it aim to solve? How accurate are human doctors at reading images like x-rays and MRIs? And why is our instinct to trust them over programs that can sort through tens of thousands of similar images to draw a more accurate conclusion?
GUEST: Dr. Hamid Tizhoosh, director of the KIMIA lab at the University of Waterloo