Artificial intelligence and pediatrics: A synthetic mini review

TL;DR

This paper reviews the history and recent developments of artificial intelligence applications in pediatrics, highlighting key milestones and potential future directions in AI-driven pediatric healthcare.

Contribution

It provides a synthetic overview of AI's evolution in pediatrics, emphasizing historical context, technological advancements, and emerging trends in the field.

Findings

AI has a long history in medicine dating back to 1968.

The IBM Watson platform successfully diagnosed and treated a rare leukemia in 2016.

Early pediatric AI systems like SHELP were developed in the 1980s.

Abstract

The use of artificial intelligence intelligencein medicine can be traced back to 1968 when Paycha published his paper Le diagnostic a l'aide d'intelligences artificielle, presentation de la premiere machine diagnostri. Few years later Shortliffe et al. presented an expert system named Mycin which was able to identify bacteria causing severe blood infections and to recommend antibiotics. Despite the fact that Mycin outperformed members of the Stanford medical school in the reliability of diagnosis it was never used in practice due to a legal issue who do you sue if it gives a wrong diagnosis?. However only in 2016 when the artificial intelligence software built into the IBM Watson AI platform correctly diagnosed and proposed an effective treatment for a 60-year-old womans rare form of leukemia the AI use in medicine become really popular.On of first papers presenting the use of AI in paediatrics was published in 1984. The paper introduced a computer-assisted medical decision making system called SHELP.