This episode of Computer Chronicles from November 1985 returned to a favorite topic of the show: artificial intelligence and expert systems. Here, the focus was on the practical applications of such technology to the field of medicine. Essentially, how could computers be used to improve the delivery of health care?

From Artificial Hearts to a “Doctor in a Box”?

To kick things off, Stewart Cheifet presented his cold open from Penn State’s Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania. He held the Penn State Heart, a mechanical artificial heart that had recently been used to keep a man named Anthony Mendia alive for 10 days. But that was nothing compared to another prototype that Cheifet displayed, a new artificial heart with a microprocessor inside that could control all of the device’s functions. Cheifet said this device would be ready for human use in about five years and was just one example of how computer technology could be used in medical research.