Computer beats doctors at diagnosis

AN AI (artificial intelligence) system designed to diagnose childhood diseases can recognise symptoms more accurately than many human doctors.

The “deep learning” programme, tested in China, assimilated information from more than 1.4 million electronic health records.

It was then able to draw on its “experience” to diagnose a broad range of childhood diseases, with accuracy rates of more than 90 per cent in some cases. The system performed better than junior doctors and not quite as well as more senior experienced physicians.

The scientists who created the AI model believe it could speed up the triaging of patients in hospital emergency departments and improve the diagnosis of complex and rare conditions. But British experts insisted that intelligent machines could never take the place of humans.

The human doctor who asked targeted questions and then used his or her knowledge and experience to make a diagnosis “can be considered a classifier of sorts”, said the researchers, writing in the journal Nature Medicine.

The AI programme worked in a similar way, sifting through vast amounts of information “to mimic the clinical reasoning of human physicians”.

To create the system the scientists in America and China obtained electronic health records from 1,362,559 outpatient visits to the Guangzhou Women and Children’s Medical Centre in China.

British expert Professor Duc Pham, from the University of Birmingham, said the study was an “excellent application of deep learning” but said such systems could not guarantee 100 per cent correct results. He added: “Critical judgments or decisions must always be left to qualified human experts to make.”