By Eliza Strickland

Here at The Human OS, we are slightly obsessed with matchups between artificial intelligence and doctors.

In many experiments (though not yet in many clinics), AI systems are showing great promise in diagnosing diseases, analyzing medical images, and predicting health outcomes. They’ve even performed better than human doctors in certain tasks like surgical stitching and diagnosing autism in infants.

Now, in the latest win for AI medicine, researchers at the University of Nottingham in the UK created a system that scanned patients’ routine medical data and predicted which of them would have heart attacks or strokes within 10 years. When compared to the standard method of prediction, the AI system correctly predicted the fates of 355 more patients.

Predicting these cardiovascular events is a notoriously difficult task. In a recent paper, published in the journal PLOS One, the researchers note that about half of all heart attacks and strokes occur in people who haven’t been flagged as “at risk.” [READ MORE]