(BUSINESS INSIDER) -- There's an elusive innovation that would revolutionize medicine: a way to detect disease before it becomes obvious.
A study recently published in the journal Scientific Reports could bring us a step closer to that capability. The paper reveals how artificial intelligence analyses of routine medical scans could be turned into powerful predictors of a person's health and risk of death.
For the study, researchers used a machine-learning algorithm to analyze routine chest CT scans from 48 adults, all of whom were over 60. By contrasting data from the scans, the system was able to predict the chances that study participants would die within five years with about 70% accuracy — about as accurate as mortality predictions by a human expert, according to the study. (The researchers used old data from patients who had already either survived or died within five years, which enabled them to verify the system's predictions.)