WHAT WILL CARDIOVASCULAR MEDICINE GAIN FROM MACHINE LEARNING AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?
Cardiologists make decisions for patient care from data, and they tend to have access to richer quantitative data on patients compared with many other specialties. Despite some potential pitfalls, it is becoming evident that the best way to make decisions on the basis of data is through the application of techniques drawn from AI. Cardiologists will thus need to incorporate AI and machine learning into the clinic. Indeed, as the amount of available patientlevel data continues to increase and we continue to incorporate new streams of complex biomedical data into the clinic, it is likely that AI will become essential to the practice of clinical medicine. This will probably happen sooner rather than later, as exemplified by the rapid adoption of automated algorithms for computer vision in radiology and pathology (52). However, the incorporation of AI into cardiology is not something that clinicians should fear, but is instead a change that should be embraced. AI will drive improved patient care because physicians will be able to interpret more data in greater depth than ever before. Reinforcement learning algorithms will become companion physician aids, unobtrusively assisting physicians and streamlining clinical care. Advances in unsupervised learning will enable far greater characterization of patients’ disorders and ultimately lead to better treatment selection and improved outcomes. Indeed, AI may obviate much of the tedium of modern-day clinical practice, such as interacting with EHRs and billing, which will likely soon be intelligently automated to a much greater extent. Although currently machine learning is often performed by personnel with specialized training, in the future deploying these methods will become increasingly easy and commoditized. The expert knowledge of pathophysiology and clinical presentation that physicians acquire over their training and career will remain vital. Physicians should therefore take a lead role in deciding where to apply and how to interpret these models.
