Title: Artificial Intelligence for Medicine

Units: 6 for 15-182 and 9 for 15-282

Pre-requisites: None for 15-182 and 15-112 (i.e., Fundamentals of Programming and Computer Science) for 15-282

Description:

This course introduces Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its recent applications in medicine for students with only a little background in computer science. It starts by motivating and defining AI, before folding over to a survey of some of its newest applications to medicine, including diagnosis, prognosis, drug discovery, and recommendations of individualized treatments, to mention just a few. Afterwards, it provides a bird’s-eye view of some of the major AI techniques, including machine learning, deep neural networks, recommendation systems, ranked retrieval, and probabilistic graphical models. Finally, it concludes with a discussion on some of the concerns related to AI, including ethical issues, job security, society, and healthcare institutions, among others.

The course comprises a balance of lectures, case studies, live demonstrations of some medical AI applications, problem-solving & programming assignments (only for 15-282), and research tasks. The students will be exposed to industry- and research-based perspectives on AI for medicine. In addition, students registering for 15-282 will learn through a course project the nuances of working with medical data and applying an AI model to solve a concrete problem in medicine.