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| Can Artificial Intelligence Make Doctors Better? |
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This is a class room for artificial intelligence, or AI.
Its teacher, Rishi Rawat is feeding the computer more samples of cancer cells.
"So, they're like a computer brain, and you can put the data into them and they will learn the patterns that's important for making decisions."
Decisions by doctors to determine the best treatment for their patients.
"Machines are not gonna take over the place of doctors.
Computers will not treat patients, but they will help make certain decisions and look for things that the human brain can't recognize these patterns by itself."
For examples, once a cancerous tumor is removed from a patient with breast cancer, the doctors still have to treat the patient to reduce the risk of recurrence.
The type of treatment depends on the type of cancer and whether the tumor is driven by estrogen.
"So, what the pathologist has to do is to count what percentage of the cells here are brown, versus what percentage are not."
This process could take days or even longer.
The computer can do something better than just count cells.
AI can recognize complicated patterns on how the cells are arranged, with the hope, in the near future of making a quick and more reliable diagnosis that is free of human error.
"Are they disordered?
Are they in a regular spacing?
What's going on exactly with the arrangement of the cells in the tissue."
Scientists say the time is ripe for the marriage between computer science and cancer research.
"All of a sudden, we have the computing power to really do it in real time.
We have the ability of scanning a slide to high enough resolution so that the computer can see every little feature of the cancer.
So it's a convergence of technology.
We couldn't have done this.
We didn't have the computing power to do this several years ago.
But now, it's all changed."
The research now is on breast cancer, but doctors predict artificial intelligence will eventually be used to help treat patients with all forms of cancer.
Elizabeth Lee, VOA News, Los Angeles
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