Summary
Introduction: Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies continue to attract interest from a broad
range of disciplines in recent years, including health. The increase in computer hardware
and software applications in medicine, as well as digitization of health-related data
together fuel progress in the development and use of AI in medicine. This progress
provides new opportunities and challenges, as well as directions for the future of
AI in health.
Objective: The goals of this survey are to review the current state of AI in health, along
with opportunities, challenges, and practical implications. This review highlights
recent developments over the past five years and directions for the future.
Methods: Publications over the past five years reporting the use of AI in health in clinical
and biomedical informatics journals, as well as computer science conferences, were
selected according to Google Scholar citations. Publications were then categorized
into five different classes, according to the type of data analyzed. Results: The
major data types identified were multi-omics, clinical, behavioral, environmental
and pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) data. The current state of AI related
to each data type is described, followed by associated challenges and practical implications
that have emerged over the last several years. Opportunities and future directions
based on these advances are discussed.
Conclusion: Technologies have enabled the development of AI-assisted approaches to healthcare.
However, there remain challenges. Work is currently underway to address multi-modal
data integration, balancing quantitative algorithm performance and qualitative model
interpretability, protection of model security, federated learning, and model bias.
Keywords
AI - health - deep learning - machine learning - natural language processing - federated
learning