AI and Pediatrics

A quick evolution of AI in pediatrics with some of its current uses in pediatric medicine today.

The incorporation of artificial intelligence into pediatric medicine has been primarily focused on brain mapping, developmental disorders, oncology, gene profiling, emergency care, and pattern recognition.

These processes deal with a glut of data, the amount of which is expansive.

One of the earliest papers about AI in pediatrics was published in 1984, and it introduced a computer-assisted medical decision-making system known as SHELP.

SHELP, created to diagnose inborn errors related to metabolism even in rare cases, played an important role in the clinical diagnoses and treatment of pediatric diseases.

Before 2008, the major research work on AI and pediatrics focused on the use of applications controlled by ruled-based systems (knowledge-based expert systems), artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms, and decision trees.

These applications came in handy in knowledge extraction and decision making relating to mortality and survival prediction, preterm birth, melanoma, lesion treatment, cancer, and neuroblastoma.

Between 2009 to 2012, the use of AI in pediatrics advanced, becoming more complex. It…