History of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine

The history of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine is relatively short. The initial application was in the form of rule-based expert systems and was not widely adopted due to both unfavorable workflow and inadequate compute power. The expert system consisted of a knowledge base, a rules engine, and a user interface. Among the first such systems was MYCIN and INTERNIST. Other AI methodologies used for medicine included fuzzy logic and then neural network. Recently, a number of AI tools have had FDA clearance.