NYUTron, an artificial intelligence system developed by New York University, has proven to be highly helpful in reading medical notes and accurately anticipating a patient’s risk of death, according to a new study published in the journal Nature.
Artificial intelligence has proven helpful in reading medical imaging and can even pass doctors’ licensing exams.
Now, a new AI tool has demonstrated the ability to read physicians’ notes and accurately anticipate patients’ risk of death, readmission to the hospital, and other outcomes important to their care.
Designed by a team at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the software is currently in use at the university’s affiliated hospitals throughout New York, hoping it will become a standard part of health care.
A study on its predictive value was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Lead author Eric Oermann, an NYU neurosurgeon and computer scientist, told AFP that while non-AI predictive models have been around in medicine for a long time, they were hardly used in practice because the data they needed requires cumbersome reorganization and formatting.
The extensive language model, called NYUTron, was trained on millions of clinical notes from the health records of 387,000 people who received care within NYU Langone hospitals between January 2011 and May 2020.
One of the critical challenges for the software was interpreting the natural language that physicians write in, which varies significantly among individuals, including in the abbreviations they choose.
It outperformed most doctors on its predictions and the non-AI computer models used today.
AI will never be a substitute for the physician-patient relationship, said Oermann. Instead, they will help “provide more information for physicians seamlessly at the point of care, so they can make more informed decisions.”
Miroslava Salazar with AFP
