AI: Beyond 20/20

From spotting irregularities in radiology scans to finding that photo from 2012, AI is changing how we see.

Author

Connie Connors
September 14, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Diagnostic Detection with AI

Not to lean into the pun, but ophthalmologists’ offices are loaded with the latest detection tools. I am that geek who actually asks to take home a picture of my retina. AI helps doctors see what they cannot see (the inside of the retina) or might miss, especially very subtle changes. Using AI with humans often catches more disease without too many false alarms, which obviously reduces a patient’s stress levels but also eases workloads for specialists.

With so many aspects to medicine and healthcare — administration, records, prevention, diagnosis, surgery, research, etc. — it will be some time before we can claim AI has revolutionized “medicine.” The most current, real-use cases include:

  • In breast cancer screening, AI+human detects more cancers than with human-only readings resulting in reduced “call backs for follow-ups.”

  • In chest X-ray tasks (like distinguishing COVID-19 viral pneumonia versus bacterial or other classes), AI is extremely accurate (>99.95%), sometimes nearly perfect (100%) in some test sets.

  • In brain MRI scans, AI has been shown to detect metastatic brain cancer spread, non-surgically with high accuracy (>85%) by learning from patterns that are subtle.

AI-assisted brain scans with outline of tumor vs surrounding areas

Chest X-ray with highlighted nodules that a radiologist initially missed

News: Apple hypertension alerts, available in its Watch Series 9 and above, received FDA-clearance. Its hypertension notifications use data from the watches’ existing optical heart sensor to “analyze how a user’s blood vessels respond to the beats of the heart” over a 30-day period.

Image Detection: Virtual Shoebox of Photos

I rarely meet someone who can find “that photo” in a split second. We take 6-20 photos a day. It’s not like growing up in a pre-digital era when taking 24 photos (that’s how they rolled, literally) was the max for a one-week vacation. My precious prints were neatly “catalogued” in a Tretorn tennis shoebox.***

While image search, powered by AI, isn’t perfect yet, try it. (If you’re that photo maven, skip this section.) For Apple Photos, the “search” icon is on the top. For Google, the “Ask” button is its AI search, Gemini. Note: There are hundreds, if not thousands, of photo apps and tools. For the casual social media poster, there is Picsart, and for professionals, Adobe Lightroom. In the “top apps” lists today, 4 out of 10 are photo tools.

NOT JUST PICTURES, BUT A THOUSAND WORDS

If you’re even the slightest bit of a language nut — my roots are in Catholic high school and a great aunt who was the first librarian in Omaha — you probably subscribe to some word-a-day thingy or you are a Wordle competitor. I love Wordsmarts.* It’s part urban dictionary and part historian, without the Latin origins. On its homepage now, “Is it ‘Toward’ or ‘Towards’,” which for me is a personal pet peeve.

Until Next Time

Stay curious, keep looking, keep learning. Because in a world chock-full* of discoveries, almost is plenty.

Connie

*** Vintage Tretorn shoeboxes, sans shoes, can be purchased on eBay. Really? People actually pay for shoeboxes? See, you learned something this week.

UP NEXT: AI in the home. Design tools.