James L. Mulshine, MD, on Artificial Intelligence Tools for COVID-19

In an interview with CancerNetwork®, James L. Mulshine, MD, professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at Rush Medical College, spoke about the potential use of artificial intelligence in identifying patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

The lung cancer expert has focused his research on using artificial intelligence tools to help identify patients with lung cancer, however since the beginning of the pandemic, his focus has shifted to using the technology for patients with COVID-19. 

“The techniques for doing this are very challenging, because measuring differences, you know, is the process getting worse or is it getting better or is it staying the same, you’re talking about measuring extraordinarily small volumes of change,” said Mulshine. “So, these can be very important, but in the clinical setting, you’ve got to figure out how you can do it reliably.”

In order for an artificial intelligence technique to properly work in medicine, Mulshine noted that there are a lot of parts that must be able to function well in collaboration. 

“With an AI approach in medicine, you would assume that there is going to be a chorus of various AI tools that are woven together in a particular workflow to address the medical need of the medical community,” Mulshine explained. “So, being able to have 1 AI tool predictably work well with another AI tool and another AI tool, there has to be some ground rules in which they all can function in a systematic way to achieve that objective. And that’s where we’re at now in the field.”

This segment comes from the CancerNetwork^® portion of the MJH Life Sciences National Broadcast, airing daily on all MJH Life Sciences channels.