With the topic of artificial intelligence filling up our news feeds and dinner conversations, it's almost too easy to get swept up in the hype of it all. Recently, the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, a panel of experts on the subject took a crack at how much of the AI talk is based in reality and how much of a near-term impact it could realistically have in the near term.

"I think a lot of people walk around thinking that AI is a black box and a computer is going to do everything," said Kenneth Bahk, managing director of Three Lakes Partners, a venture philanthropy focused on improving the lives of people with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, and the panel moderator. "We’re all realizing that it really is a guided process. It is a combination of a machine and man to result in a better response.”

At a very simplistic level, AI can be defined as algorithms and software that are trained to recognize patterns, said Gini Deshpande, CEO of NuMedii, a company using big data and AI in drug discovery.

Read the full article about artificial intelligence as it relates to health by Amanda Pedersen at MDDI Online.