The Future of AI in Clinical Trials

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already revolutionizing the conduct of science and the practice of medicine. From basic discovery to gaining insights about someone’s health through machine-eyes, new applications of AI are announced almost daily. AI is increasingly being used to enhance the practice of medicine with action ranging from augmenting human judgment to full task automation. The potential for AI to transform clinical research is also great, and the progress already observed in discovery science and applications to medicine are critically needed in the clinical research domain. This Editorial highlights the findings of a new article in JAMA Cardiology that examines the potential for natural language processing (NLP) models to accurately classify heart failure hospitalizations compared with the gold standard for clinical adjudication and places the findings from this study in context of the possibilities for improving clinical trials through AI.