Jul 2, 2026 · 28 min · 12 segments
The next episode from our colleagues at TopMedTalk features Andy Cumpstey interviewing James Bowness, consultant anaesthetist, at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and an…
James BownessGuest
Andy CumpsteyHost
Owen DawHost
So before we dive into all that really interesting stuff then, let's start off right back basic.
When we're talking about AI, what do we mean? What sort of things does it cover? What sort of things does it not cover? And how does that really impact us anesthet...
Yeah, it's a good question because we've all heard of AI, but it can mean different things to different people, and that's because it's a broad church with many individual disciplines within it.
The term artificial intelligence in its totality was coined by someone called John McCarthy in 1953, computer scientist who convened a meeting, I think it was in Dartmouth College, of like-minded individuals the summer 1953 to sort of discuss this field.
And that term, that definition that he or they came up with was the field of computer science which tries to enable computers to perform tasks traditionally associated with human intelligence.
Obviously, that is a lot of individual tasks and applications, but also there's a variety of computational techniques that encompasses.
That is where it's a form of machine learning where you can encode artificial neurons in a neural network.
An artificial neuron is essentially a mathematical function which will take a data input, process it, and put out another data set.
Um, as the data goes in, it's handled and passed to the sequential layers providing conceptual depth.
That happens coincidentally to be particularly adept at handling imaging data, and the application of machine learning or deep learning applied to the visual world is sometimes called computer vision.
But there are other areas, many other disciplines within AI as well, and those two specific examples.
But for people that maybe haven't got as much experience in this topic, why is it relevant to all of us practicing in the healthcare space at the moment?
When i- in 1950, the doubling time of the corpus of knowledge of medical data was around fifty years.
So before we dive into all that really interesting stuff then, let's start off right back basic.
When we're talking about AI, what do we mean? What sort of things does it cover? What sort of things does it not cover? And how does that really impact us anesthet...
Yeah, it's a good question because we've all heard of AI, but it can mean different things to different people, and that's because it's a broad church with many individual disciplines within it.
The term artificial intelligence in its totality was coined by someone called John McCarthy in 1953, computer scientist who convened a meeting, I think it was in Dartmouth College, of like-minded individuals the summer 1953 to sort of discuss this field.
And that term, that definition that he or they came up with was the field of computer science which tries to enable computers to perform tasks traditionally associated with human intelligence.
Obviously, that is a lot of individual tasks and applications, but also there's a variety of computational techniques that encompasses.
That is where it's a form of machine learning where you can encode artificial neurons in a neural network.
An artificial neuron is essentially a mathematical function which will take a data input, process it, and put out another data set.
Um, as the data goes in, it's handled and passed to the sequential layers providing conceptual depth.
That happens coincidentally to be particularly adept at handling imaging data, and the application of machine learning or deep learning applied to the visual world is sometimes called computer vision.
But there are other areas, many other disciplines within AI as well, and those two specific examples.
But for people that maybe haven't got as much experience in this topic, why is it relevant to all of us practicing in the healthcare space at the moment?
When i- in 1950, the doubling time of the corpus of knowledge of medical data was around fifty years.
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