CLINICAL INNOVATORS
Interview by
KATLYN NEMANI, MD
Advancing Artificial
Intelligence
An interview with
Stuart Jonathan Russell, PhD
S
tuart Jonathan Russell, PhD, is a professor of computer science and Smith-Zadeh
Professor in Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, CA. He also holds an
appointment as adjunct professor of neurological surgery at the University of California, San
Francisco, CA, where he researches computational
physiology and intensive care unit monitoring.
Dr. Russel is an expert in artificial intelligence
(AI) and studies decision-making, probabilistic
reasoning, learning, robotics, and the foundations
of intelligent systems. He became a fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement of
Science in 2011, and, in 2012, he was appointed
to the Blaise Pascal Chair in Paris. Dr. Russel is
the author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, a textbook used by over 1,300 universities
in 116 countries.
What drew you to the field of AI?
Artificial intelligence studies the problem
of intelligence and how it may be created in
machines. It’s one of the most fundamental and
difficult problems there is. Human intelligence
is quite amazing, and nearly everything we have
as humans comes from that intelligence. Having
intelligent machines could extend our reach in
much the same way as ordinary machines have
extended our physical reach.
How is AI being used in the realm of medicine
right now? What developments do you expect
in the next decade?
Medical diagnosis is one of the oldest areas of AI
research. Early work on rule-based systems for
diagnosis showed promise, and Bayesian methods
developed in the 1980s proved quite successful
in combining diagnostic evidence according to
the rules of probability theory to identify and
evaluate the possible causal explanations for
46 CardioSource WorldNews
a patient’s symptoms. Unfortunately, it was
very hard to integrate those systems into the
typical physician’s workflow in those days;
they asked a lot of questions, required a lot of
typing, and were quite brittle because they did
We are also seeing
AI systems being
used in research
to interpret data,
and to build and
manipulate complex
models of cells,
tissues, and organs in
order to understand
the processes
and develop new
treatments.
not have access to the “whole patient,” only to
the circumscribed list of symptoms. In areas
such as tissue pathology and mammography,
where the evidence is the image and the image
is now online, we are starting to see successful
applications of AI technology; in cardiology,
ECG interpretation has been semi-automated
for quite a while. Robotic surgery is already a
reality for certain procedures and will become
more widespread as AI systems learn how to
manipulate soft tissue and interpret visual and
other imagery during a procedure. As electronic
medical records, genomic information, and
wearable monitors become ubiquitous, we’ll see
useful AI systems, including personalized diet
and health regimens, health alerts, long-term
monitoring of chronic conditions, and long-term
health cost prognosis for individuals. We are
also seeing AI systems being used in research
to interpret data, and to build and manipulate
complex models of cells, tissues, and organs in
order to understand the processes and develop
new treatments.
What kind of work are you doing in the medical
field?
For the last few years, I have been collaborating
with Geoffrey Manley, MD, PhD’s group at
UCSF. Dr. Manley is a leading expert in both
neurotrauma and intensive care medicine. The
goal is to apply AI methods to interpret the data
collected from the patient in real time in the ICU.
The approach involves building complex models
of the underlying physiology—cardiovascular,
pulmonary, intracranial, etc.—and of the
associated sensor devices, and to combine
those models with the measured data (using
Bayesian techniques) to adapt the models to the
individual patient’s physiology, and to assess
the probabilities of pathophysiological states
such as hematoma or cerebral vasospasm. Those
probabilities are very useful for the nurse or
physician in deciding on a course of treatment.
Eventually, we’d like to contribute to the
treatment-planning problem as well. Hundreds
of medical procedures and dozens of drugs are
administered in the ICU to a patient over an
extended period, and, at the moment, it’s mostly
reactive (just trying to keep the patient state
October 2015