radiology and pathology, among others, van Houten says. For example, Philips’s IntelliSpace Portal software helps doctors track how cancer patients’ tumors are growing or shrinking, with algorithms that can pull data from archives of tumor scans, and can automatically trace the contours of a tumor on the screen and calculate how it has changed, he says.
“That speeds up the time the radiologist needs to spend on the patient,” van Houten says. “But they feel they stay in control.”
Van Houten, like many developers of healthcare A.I., pushes the technology as an assistant to caregivers—not as a replacement for them. “I think doctors very much want to understand their role in the whole diagnosis process, and not only leave it to an automated process,” he says. Philips has “chosen to integrate A.I. algorithms in our workstations so they become part of the care pathway and how doctors and patients interact,” he adds.
