Neural networks on the lookout for health, artificial intelligence (AI) - neural network diagnoses and recognizes diseases from photos

Artificial intelligence can learn to recognize diseases by face. How does it work?

March 1, 2022, 17:05 MSC.

Artificial intelligence recognizes diseases from photos

Doctors are already using some AI technology, but so far it’s limited.

Can artificial intelligence identify a disease from a photo?

We tell together with the doctor.

Technology does not stand still, including medical technology. Every year there are more and more inventions that help doctors make diagnoses and prescribe treatment faster and more efficiently. Recently, scientists from the University of Bonn in Germany have presented an artificial intelligence that has learned to recognize rare diseases from patients’ photos.

general practitioner

Artificial intelligence (AI), or artificial intelligence in medicine is now playing a huge role, literally every month leading to progress and revolutions in its various fields.

According to scientists, most diseases are genetic. Mutations that provoke them, often also lead to seemingly insignificant changes in appearance – they depend on specific diseases. These are the signs that artificial intelligence pays attention to, analyzes them, identifies patterns, and automatically links them to real symptoms and genetic information of other people.

What does a doctor think about this?

Georgi: AI is actually now playing a huge role in medicine: ophthalmology, describing X-rays, CT and MRI results. For example, in Israel, such technologies are already practiced in hospitals that treat ordinary patients every day. So these are not just pretty words. AI really works and helps real people already now.

In the same case, scientists analyzed studies on the relationship between diseases and facial structure and found that by recognizing faces, AI can identify diseases due to specific features. Now the authors of the work have considered more than 1,000 diseases based on 20,000 photos of patients.

The system’s work is similar to that of an experienced doctor, who can guess what a patient is ill with just by seeing him. As in the case of a specialist, for artificial intelligence, correct diagnoses are just a matter of observation and experience.