How will AI transform health care? Northeastern to host workshop and conference focused on precision health

Ideally, artificial intelligence should make going to the doctor an easier and less stressful experience.  

“If AI is working the way that we envision it, you actually won’t notice a lot of direct impact,” says Sam Scarpino, the AI+Life Sciences director at Northeastern University’s Institute for Experiential AI. “What you’ll notice is that more pharmaceuticals are coming to market for treating increasingly rare diseases. You’ll notice more time with your physician. We will be catching cancer earlier, when it’s more treatable.”  

In a best-case scenario, AI should run in the background “the same way that a good car runs smoothly without you thinking about what’s under the hood or what is keeping the wheels moving,” adds Gene Tunik, the AI+Health director at the institute.  

Yet the reality is that for as much progress we have made in AI — with its uses to develop drugs, help diagnose cancers and optimize medical data management — it is not used in every hospital or embraced at every clinic.

There are still many challenges to overcome in terms of the accuracy and reliability of AI-based technologies, the costs of deploying them on a large scale, and the constraints in harnessing high-quality data for their development.

So, what needs to be done to help us get there?

Next month, the Institute for Experiential AI will invite a host of health care and AI experts to Northeastern’s Boston campus to discuss just that at The Future of AI in Health & Life Sciences Education: Workshop and The State of AI in Precision Health Conference.

---

Continue reading at Northeastern Global News.

Register for upcoming conference here and the workshop here.