When will AI replace your radiologist?

We asked Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist and geneticist at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego who sifted through reams of published research on AI in medicine. And his answer, perhaps not surprisingly, is that we’re not there yet.

That’s not to say there’s no there there. In the imaging world, there are things machines can be trained to see that would escape the human eye, Topol said, and there’s reason to believe AI will make further inroads in disease diagnosis.

But “even when you have a wonderfully performing algorithm, that doesn’t mean anything if it isn’t having a clinical impact, if it isn’t helping patients,” Topol said. The discrepancy between promise and practicality is what Topol calls “the AI chasm.”

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