Why This Doctor Is Building an 'AI Sherlock' for Medical Pros

In the medical community, a clinician's opinion holds sway, and so wariness among professionals about bogus intelligence is not surprising.

But Dr. Anthony C. Chang, practicing Pediatric Cardiologist and Primary Intelligence and Innovation Officer at the Children's Hospital of Orange County (CHOC) saw the writing on the wall several years ago and has embraced the emerging engineering. He even went back to school later on several decades as a physician to study biomedical data scientific discipline and AI at Stanford Schoolhouse of Medicine.

Today, he's frequently referred to as "Dr. AI," speaks regularly at Singularity University Exponential Medicine conferences, and presides over the Medical Intelligence and Innovation Institute (MI3), the start of its kind inside a infirmary, funded by the Sharon Disney Lund Foundation.

We sabbatum down with Dr. Chang at the AIMed symposium in Laguna Niguel, California, in December to talk about his pioneering piece of work and how he wants to build a Sherlock-fashion AI clinician-figurer scientist interface. Here are edited and condensed excerpts from our conversation.

Let'south start with your concept of "AI Sherlock" as a doctor's partner.
I realized that when nosotros proceed gathering together physicians from like backgrounds and mindsets, we go back and forth with the same bug, ideas and controversies, and whomever has the highest decibel voice wins the argument. I knew there had to be some other fashion to get to the answers than only through evidence-based, every bit opposed to data-supported, medicine. I idea it would be wonderful if every doc had an AI-based partner like the data-savvy and objective-thinking Sherlock.

Which is an unusual view in your profession.
[Laughs] Yes, especially ten to xv years ago. Considering, equally doctors, we'd been trained to memorize publications and results, considering those accented truths from some oracle. I've ever been something of a radical and didn't want to take that position necessarily. I saw then much information contained in records, experience gleaned from other doctors, and I knew in that location had to be a way to organize and interpret all this data to ameliorate medicine, to create a "super opinion" of some kind.

So you took the brave step of going back to schoolhouse, afterward decades of seniority in your profession, and attended Stanford.
I love to be out of my comfort zone, because I acquire and then much there and biomedical data science was starting to become a existent plan, with the ane at Stanford beingness among the first. In fact, I downloaded my application to Stanford on February 16, 2022.

The night IBM Watson won Jeopardy.
That was a watershed moment—and a wake-upwards call.

Are you a unlike sort of doctor now, mail-Stanford?
Afterwards Stanford, I felt as if I had a more complete brain, using both the analytic/procedural thinking data scientist aspect and my training in medicine. I idea this new knowledge would exist condiment, but it's actually geometric, in the way it's enlarged my brain, giving me a deep insight and perspective into what's coming next.

Which is why information technology makes sense you're both the Medical Director and Chief Intelligence and Innovation Officer at the Medical Intelligence and Innovation Institute, at CHOC today.
Our patients are also valuable not to take the best of both worlds at the peak today.

Information technology'southward articulate many in your profession are coming round to your point of view. Here at AIMed today, the conference hall is full of very senior physicians, eager to larn about medical intelligence, which is unusual, equally tech-focused conferences tend to skew much younger.
I'thousand very happy near that. I feel that less than v percent of doctors currently understand the magnitude of AI's entry into medicine. Meetings like this are bully, because we take an even carve up between clinicians and non-medically trained personnel. There has been too much depletion in other fields, equally data scientific discipline replaced experienced staff, I don't want that to happen in medicine. We have 20 countries represented hither at AIMed, with many more asking if we tin bring the next one to their part of the world, and we'll be going to Asia and Europe side by side year.

Artificial Intelligence

Symposia aside, can y'all talk in practical terms about the AI-based clinician-computer scientist interface you lot're building now?
It's called LEONARDO, after the Renaissance creative person/scientist Leonardo Da Vinci, who, in 1513, was the first person to describe a congenital heart defect, [in that location's a paper here, if you want to learn more]. It'due south an interface betwixt clinicians with information and computer scientists with analytics to assure a data-to-information continuum and eventually a noesis-to-intelligence transfer. Drawing on advanced computing, graph databases, computer vision, natural language processing, IoT, neuromorphic computing, genomics and deep learning, LEONARDO combines both the electric current state of agreement and enquiry, with the seasoned wisdom of sagacious senior physicians, while minimizing diagnostic and therapeutic errors. Within 20 years, I believe, it volition get a tireless and omnipresent multilingual supermentor for generations to come up, working alongside human cardiologists in AI-based clinical synergy.

The rapid development of AI within all fields is exciting, do you ever want to have off your white coat, permanently, and caput n to Silicon Valley?
It would be very tempting to end practicing medicine and dive into advising and setting up startups in the Bay Area, but I experience a demand to encounter patients every day to fully understand the pain points and realize what we tin do for them using all this advanced reckoner technology.

If you want to learn more, Dr. Chang's Medical Intelligence and Innovation Institute (MI3) holds regular monthly meetings, open to the public, with invited speakers. They volition also be holding an Innovation Embankment issue on February. 21 in Orange, CA. AIMed returns in December 2022.

Disclosure: Sophia Stuart stayed at the Ritz Carlton Laguna Niguel equally a guest of AIMed to nourish the conference.