Statisticians warn that AI is still not ready to diagnose COVID-19

shirappu writes: The development of AI systems for medical application is constantly ongoing, and ranges from chatbots and medical imaging to automating paperwork and predictive diagnosis. Many believe AI systems can ease the workload of doctors by predicting COVID-19 in CT scans and X-ray images.

However a group of medical statisticians is reviewing many of these predictive models as they are released, and so far they still aren't performing to a high enough level. The main problems appear to be (perhaps unsurprisingly) a lack of necessary data, and not enough domain expertise.

The leader of the above group of statisticians, Maarten van Smeden, pointed to a lack of cooperation between researchers as a road block in the way of developing truly accurate models. "You need expertise not only of the modeler," he said, "but you need statisticians, epidemiologists and clinicians to work together to make something that is actually useful."