An artificial intelligence programme developed in China that combs through test results, health records and even handwritten notes diagnosed childhood diseases as accurately as doctors, researchers have found. From the flu and asthma to life-threatening pneumonia and meningitis, the system consistently matched or out-performed primary care paediatricians, they reported in Nature Medicine . AI-based technology learns and improves in a way similar to humans, but has virtually unlimited capacity for data processing. “I believe that it will be able to perform most of the jobs a doctor does,” senior author Kang Zhang, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego, said. “But AI will never replace a doctor,” he added, comparing the relationship to an autonomous car that remains under the supervision of a human driver.
