Dubbed “FireANTs,” the algorithm operates differently from many AI approaches to analyzing medical images. “Typically, AI systems make predictions based on their training data,” says Pratik Chaudhari, assistant professor in electrical and systems engineering and co-senior author of a study in Nature Communications.

“FireANTs, by contrast, borrows optimization techniques from modern AI but solves the matching problem mathematically, determining how one image actually corresponds to another without relying too much on guessing based on past examples.”