Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare Decision-Making

Artificial intelligence, and more specifically, its subset machine learning, have been increasingly impacting the field of orthopedic surgery. The number of machine learning-related publications within the orthopedic literature has been increasing every year. Models can primarily be used to help clinicians with both diagnostic and prognostic tasks and will likely play a major role in clinical practice in the near future. Despite the many obstacles to overcome in order to achieve the ultimate goal of improved patient care through AI-powered advancements, the future is promising and clinicians should familiarize themselves with the basics of clinical artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, at this time, there has been little widespread adoption of machine learning algorithms into daily practice and many orthopedic surgeons remain cautious regarding these novel statistical techniques. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce artificial intelligence as it relates to orthopedic surgery and sports medicine, providing examples from the literature along the way.