Facebook to make MRI scans faster thru’ artificial intelligence

Facebook has announced its new research project targeting use of artificial intelligence (AI) for making MRI scans up to 10 times faster. It has been granted access to approximately 3 million MRI images from 10,000 clinical cases, according to Moneycontrol News.

As per a report in Business Insider India, the social networking giant has data that has patient names with some vital details about their health removed. The project is compliant with HIPAA privacy regulations. The project is a collaboration between FAIR AI research lab of Facebook and NYU School of Medicine's Department of Radiology.

The project aims at cutting the downtime by using AI to capture fewer data and focus on scanning the important things.

This way patients can take the scans more easily, the speed of MRIs increases, and brings down costs. The approach is the same as human beings processing sensory information.

Earlier, Facebook had faced outrage over its privacy policies and use of customer data after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This time, they are initiative, reassuring that no Facebook data would be used in the project.

There was an outrage earlier when CNBC reported that Facebook was talking to hospitals about sharing patient data and  the project was put on hold.