[Artificial intelligence : What do urologists need to know?]

In the past 10 years, the methods of artificial intelligence (AI) have experienced breakthroughs that have opened up a multitude of new fields of application for information technology. AI is particularly strong in those areas where patterns have to be recognized and conclusions and forecasts based on large, multiparametric data sets have to be drawn. Computers are superior to us in terms of precision and speed in these problems. These advances in information technology reach us at a time when innovations in diagnostics and sensor technology enable more precise patient stratification and confront medical personnel with an increasing quantity and quality of patient data. Urology is symbolic of this new complexity of medicine, in which multi-layered diagnostic cascades require a high degree of interdisciplinarity and, especially in uro-oncology, therapeutic strategies are becoming more differentiated and require the interpretation of multiple clinical and diagnostic data. Here, methods of Artificial Intelligence will in future support medical personnel in diagnostics and therapy decisions and thus come closer to the goal of precision medicine. A prerequisite for the success of AI-based support tools will be the transparent development and validation of the software, as well as the population-based visualization of decision parameters.