Now, AI can diagnose heart disease, cancer early

Researchers in the UK have developed new artificial intelligence (AI) systems which can help diagnose heart disease and lung cancer much more accurately and early.
Currently cardiologists can tell from the timing of the heartbeat in scans if there is a problem. However, even the best doctors get it wrong in one in five cases.
Patients are either sent home and have a heart attack or they undergo an unnecessary operation.
A new AI system created at the John Radcliffe Hospital in the UK diagnoses heart scans much more accurately. It can pick up details in the scans that doctors cannot see.

The system then provides a recommendation - positive - which means that it believes that there is a risk of the patient having a heart attack.
The system has been tested in clinical trials in six cardiology units.

According to Professor Paul Leeson, who developed the system, the data indicates that the system has greatly outperformed his fellow heart specialists, 'BBC News' reported.
The system, called Ultromics, was trained to identify potential problems by being fed the scans of 1,000 patients who Leeson had treated over the past seven years, along with information about whether they went on to have heart problems.

Another AI system developed by a start-up in the UK is looking for signs of lung cancer. It searches for large clumps of cells called nodules.
Doctors can not tell whether these clumps are harmless or will go on to become cancerous and so patients go on to have several more scans to see how the nodules develop.
However, clinical trials have shown that this AI system can rule out the harmless cases and also diagnose lung cancer much earlier, researchers said.