Artificial intelligence (AI) aims to mimic human cognitive functions. It is bringing a paradigm shift to healthcare, powered by increasing availability of healthcare data and rapid progress of analytics techniques. We survey the current status of AI applications in healthcare and discuss its future. AI can be applied to various types of healthcare data (structured and unstructured). Popular AI techniques include machine learning methods for structured data, such as the classical support vector machine and neural network, and the modern deep learning, as well as natural language processing for unstructured data. Major disease areas that use AI tools include cancer, neurology and cardiology. We then review in more details the AI applications in stroke, in the three major areas of early detection and diagnosis, treatment, as well as outcome prediction and prognosis evaluation. We conclude with discussion about pioneer AI systems, such as IBM Watson, and hurdles for real-life deployment of AI.

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In comparing two treatments via a randomized clinical trial, the analysis of covariance technique is often utilized to estimate an overall treatment effect. The AN-COVA is generally perceived as a more efficient procedure than its simple two sample estimation counterpart. Unfortunately when the ANCOVA model is not correctly specified, the resulting estimator is generally not consistent especially when the model is nonlin-ear. Recently various nonparametric alternatives, such as the augmentation methods, to ANCOVA have been proposed to estimate the treatment effect by adjusting the covariates. However, the properties of these alternatives have not been studied in the presence of treatment allocation imbalance. In this paper, we take a different approach to explore how to improve the precision of the naive two-sample estimate even when the observed distributions of baseline covariates between two groups are dissimilar. Specifically, we derive a bias-adjusted estimation procedure constructed from a conditional inference principle via relevant ancillary statistics from the observed covariates. This estimator is shown to be asymptotically equivalent to an augmentation estimator under the conditional setting. We utilize the data from a clinical trial for evaluating a combination treatment of cardiovascular diseases to illustrate our findings.

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We propose a class of phase II clinical trial designs with sequential stopping and adaptive treatment allocation to evaluate treatment efficacy. Our work is based on two-arm (control and experimental treatment) designs with binary endpoints. Our overall goal is to construct more efficient and ethical randomized phase II trials by reducing the average sample sizes and increasing the percentage of patients assigned to the better treatment arms of the trials. The designs combine the Bayesian decision-theoretic sequential approach with adaptive randomization procedures in order to achieve simultaneous goals of improved efficiency and ethics. The design parameters represent the costs of different decisions, e.g., the decisions for stopping or continuing the trials. The parameters enable us to incorporate the actual costs of the decisions in practice. The proposed designs allow the clinical trials to stop early for either efficacy or futility. Furthermore, the designs assign more patients to better treatment arms by applying adaptive randomization procedures. We develop an algorithm based on the constrained backward induction and forward simulation to implement the designs. The algorithm overcomes the computational difficulty of the backward induction method, thereby making our approach practicable. The designs result in trials with desirable operating characteristics under the simulated settings. Moreover, the designs are robust with respect to the response rate of the control group.