Bradley Merrill Thompson, Member of the Firm in the Health Care & Life Sciences practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was quoted in POLITICO Future Pulse, in “After the Buzz, AI Finding Its Place in Health Care,” by Darius Tahir.
Following is an excerpt:
Ready for Its Close-Up: Artificial intelligence has long been hyped as a game changer in health care: Remember this 2012 prediction that computers will replace 80 percent of doctors?
But it’s been much harder to get a sense of the real-world scale of the phenomenon. Is AI a perpetual technology of the future? Or is it starting to get a toehold?
A recently released Food and Drug Administration database starts to get at that question. The agency combed records to find every agency-approved device using artificially intelligent technology. And it turns out there’s substance to accompany the buzz. …
You can slice and dice the data in other ways. Here are the devices sorted by the area of medicine in which they’re used:
Radiology — the analysis of images — leads the pack, by far, like Usain Bolt in an Olympics final. …
The figures might also reflect why the FDA focuses on AI in radiology, said Bradley Merrill Thompson, a lawyer specializing in digital health with Epstein Becker & Green; the agency has participated in multiple events recently to help inform its thinking. Recent FDA approvals include an AI-assisted prostate scan that’s touted for both bringing down costs and increasing the accuracy and precision of MRIs looking for cancer.
