Five Takeaways from the Xavier AI Summit

CTG and partner organization, Vertica, were sponsors of the AI Summit organized by Xavier Health at the Xavier University campus in Cincinnati on Aug 23rd and 24th.

Here are CTG’s top five key takeaways from the conference:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) based products and solutions are becoming more mainstream in healthcare. A few examples:
  • Using the vast repository of knowledge in medical literature and research as the source, and applying natural language processing and other machine learning techniques to extract relationships between genes, diseases, and drugs
  • Deep learning neural networks for medical imaging analysis and classification
• As the AI algorithms have evolved and have become more complex, more emphasis is being placed on the concept of ‘explainability’, and a lot of research is being done in this area, especially in healthcare. Also known as ‘interpretability’, this relates to how the decisions made by the machines can be explained to human users so that they can develop the necessary trust in the results and the performance of the underlying systems.
• The notion of Augmented Intelligence, which views humans and machines as partners, will be more prevalent in healthcare. As evidenced by the AMA’s recent policy on Augmented Intelligence, it will provide the necessary impetus to both the system designers and the clinicians to collaboratively address the challenges involved, from design to implementation.
• While the regulatory aspects of AI-based systems do provide unique challenges to the FDA, they do not want to stifle innovation and are looking for ideas from industry practitioners and vendors on how to ensure the quality and the performance of AI-based products in the field. This AI Summit provided such a collaborative opportunity in terms of both one-on-one conversations and panel-led sessions.
• From the physicians’ standpoint, they need systems that improve diagnosis and provide the right intervention at the right time. There is a strong desire to avoid repeating the painful lessons learned in the development and implementation of electronic health records and instead have the physicians engaged throughout, starting with the prioritization of use cases.

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