“An upgraded version of Google’s medical chatbot can use smartphone photos to diagnose rashes and can evaluate a host of other types of medical imagery — improving the bot’s ability to pinpoint the cause of ailments.

An earlier version of the artificial-intelligence (AI) system outperformed physicians in diagnostic accuracy and bedside manner. The upgrade also did better than human doctors at interpreting images such as electrocardiograms and PDFs of laboratory results.

The latest version of the system, which is called the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE) and is still purely experimental, was described in a paper1 posted to the arXiv preprint server on 6 May.”

From Nature.