Mapping the patent landscape of medical machine learning.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly entering the field of medicine, but the role of patents in this process remains relatively opaque. Regulators report hundreds of machine learning (ML) medical devices that have passed regulatory oversight1, including systems involved in radiology, cardiology, ophthalmology, and many other fields. Major hospitals and academic medical systems have both developed and deployed AI/ML systems, and some AI tools have been embedded in electronic health records used by health systems covering millions of patients. Nevertheless, despite this wave of innovation in medical machine learning (MML), the influence of patents on that process has only been sketched rather than interrogated in detail.