How Far Can AI Go in Medicine?

As a young pathologist, Riyad El-Khoury spent long days hunched over a microscope—an intense, repetitive craft where fatigue is part of the job. Today, as associate professor of pathology and head of the Muhieddine Al-Ahdab Neuromuscular Diagnostic Laboratory at the American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC), he’s helping push pathology into a new era: AI-assisted diagnosis.

In this episode, El-Khoury explains why the first big shift is going digital—turning glass slides into high-resolution images that AI can analyze at scale—and why the next leap may be even bigger: prediction. He also explores a provocative possibility: a future where AI moves beyond assistance and, in some workflows, operates autonomously—raising urgent questions about bias, generalizability, interpretability, and what it will take to build systems that are safe, equitable, and worthy of clinical trust.