A researcher at Texas Tech University is making big strides in the future of medical care, using artificial intelligence to create a digital doctor’s assistant.

Yuanlin Zhang, an associate professor for computer science at TTU said he wanted to build this assistant, via a program or mobile app, that would provide accurate medical recommendations to patients and physicians.

“Physicians are pretty busy. They have to take care of so many patients. Another challenge is we have so much research going on in the medical area, it’s very unrealistic for the physician to know the state of the art medical knowledge,” he said.

The program would use thousands of pieces of medical knowledge and research to make rapid decisions on the patient’s medical conditions and their personal needs, said Zhang.

While this program would not replace doctors, it would act as a “right hand man.”

“You’re still probably going to have to do some checks and balances, but I think an artificially intelligent system would be incredibly helpful in terms of helping you make a very accurate diagnosis,” said Dr. Michael Robertson, the chief medical officer at Covenant Health Medical Partners.

Robertson said artificial intelligence has the potential to be very helpful especially in time sensitive situations.

“Take sepsis for instance. It’s one of the conditions we see fairly regularly. You have maybe an hour or so from the onset of the symptoms to be able to recognize and initiate treatment. Using artificial intelligence, that might recognize some of those things,” he said.

While a visit to the doctor could take weeks or months to get an appointment, this system could cut that time, and give a diagnosis and initial treatment options, said Robertson.

However, Zhang says the program requires another couple years before it’ll start showing up in doctor’s offices and it may take time before it is glitch free.

“I think there’s always some potential for a downside. You can’t see that until they are fairly into wide spread use and you have some problems that might pop up along the way and have to back up and re-engineer it to see if you can make it better,” said Robertson.

Since the beginning, Zhang’s goal in this project was to improve the nation’s healthcare quality. Through this project, he thinks he is on the way.