Stanford Radio

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: "Dennis Wall: The changing face of autism diagnosis and treatment" AI is reshaping diagnosis of autism, making it quicker, less expensive and more accurate. As a result, interventions are coming earlier in life, a key to more effective treatment. The current process for diagnosing autism requires no less than 10 hours of intensive doctor-to-patient observation. It is expensive and time-consuming, says autism expert Dennis Wall, an associate professor of pediatrics and of biomedical data science at Stanford. Wall is developing new ways to tackle the problem. He says advances in machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence focused on training computers to perform important medical tasks, stand to shake up the field. He’s developing computer models that can spot autism by watching just a few minutes of video of a child at play in their natural home environment. With these technologies, diagnosis happens in as little as four minutes. In addition, Wall says,