Jae Ho Sohn, MD, MS Talks About the Present and Future of AI in Health Care

"Artificial intelligence, or AI, is everywhere."

This is the opening line from a video story created by Brian Monroe, video graphics animator from the Washington Post. Indeed, AI is part of conversations between humans and virtual assistants like Alexa and Siri, but what makes it… intelligent?

AI has evolved since the 1950s when Alan Turing, mathematician, began to explore the idea of a machine's ability to think by creating the Turing Test. Fast forward to present day and AI has advanced to the point where it can work with larger data sets. Scientists in the health industry are hoping to use advances in AI to look for patterns of disease.

One such scientist is Jae Ho Sohn, MD, MS, a resident at the UC San Francisco Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging. He appears in the video story below to discuss work that he and his team are doing to adapt and work with an AI algorithm that analyzes positron emission tomography (PET) scans to search for early signs of Alzheimer's disease.

Dr. Sohn leads many major efforts in area of Big Data research. Recently, he was corresponding author on a study that aimed to develop a deep learning algorithm to predict the final clinical diagnoses of patients who underwent 18F-FDG PET of the brain. This paper was published in November 2018 in Radiology. At this time, his research is still developing, though this algorithm has achieved early success.