History of AI in Clinical Medicine

The adoption of AI in medicine can be tracked back to the mid-1960s. Despite this, digital medical data has only become ubiquitous during the last two decades. This chapter traces the evolution of AI in clinical medicine beginning with fuzzy logic and expert systems, then to artificial neural networks and more complex architectures, advancing to support vector machines, feature engineering, and natural language processing. The emergence of deep learning, convolutional neural networks, and recurrent neural networks will be described, and the recent advances in explainable AI (XAI) or interpretable deep learning and transformers will be discussed. Progress is measured by the day as new inventions are added to the arsenal of available medical tools that aid the diagnosis and treatment of disease.