What's to come for AI

July 18, 2019

Dr Schuman, section editor for Peds v2.0, is clinical assistant professor of Pediatrics, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, Lebanon, New Hampshire, and editorial advisory board member of Contemporary Pediatrics.

Dr. Andrew J. Schuman looks at the artificial intelligence (AI) programs that may be found in your practice sooner rather than later.

Deep-learning systems have enabled smartphone applications to detect middle ear effusions and enable families to better care for asthmatic children.

A company called DeepScribe (Berkeley, California; https://deepscribe.tech) is developing an application that listens to your conversation with the patient during a visit and uses AI natural language processing algorithms to write a structured note that is entered into your EHR within an hour of the visit.

Translation systems are improving and soon will let you converse with foreign language–speaking patients in real time.

A new digital stethoscope is under development that uses DL algorithms to analyze auscultated breath sounds to facilitate the diagnosis of pneumonia. There is also a smartphone application that analyzes a child’s cough to distinguish an upper-respiratory infection from a lower-respiratory infection.

There are movement cognition programs that help identify children with cerebral palsy and voice analysis systems that may facilitate identification of children with autism.

Doctors Alexa, Siri, and Google will evolve and soon will remind patients to take their medication, measure and record their sugars, and suggest healthy eating habits. They will facilitate booking appointments and facilitate telehealth visits if needed.

What's to come for AI

Andrew J Schuman, MD, FAAP