World Sleep 2022 | Artificial Intelligence – the new age of sleep medicine

Matteo Cesari, PhD, Medical University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria, discusses the rising popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine and sleep medicine, emphasizing the recent boom in research demonstrating its potential. With the ability for AI to conduct automated sleep scores and apply them in the context of wearable technologies – it is rapidly gaining appraisal. Dr Cesari comments on the ability of AI to comprehend many different algorithms, effectively conducting procedures that humans can do. However, with the abundance of algorithms that exist in AI conducting sleep medicine research, there are key challenges associated. Interpretability of the AI algorithms has proved to be one of them; even with the algorithms providing different degrees of interpretability – there are many black boxes whereby, it is not certain how the initial input data relates to the output data. There is a lot of current work focusing on the development of new techniques to improve the interpretability of the algorithms – with the intention of seeing AI replace everyday human-based tasks as a supportive tool in collating sleep medicine data in both research and clinical environments. This will hopefully provide greater efficiency in producing more results to more patients – making sleep medicine more central than ever. This interview took place at the World Sleep Congress 2022 in Rome, Italy.