Application of artificial intelligence in life science: Historical review and future perspectives

The fast advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in recent years, especially the deep learning algorithm and transformer neural network, has brought great impacts on scientific researches. As a displine focusing on curation and analysis of life science data, bioinformatics has experienced remarkable changes under the impetus of AI technologies, not only in nowadays, but also throughout its history. In this review, we firstly summarize the historical events of computer-assisted life science data analysis, then assess the features, contributions and changes of AI methods in life science research by using bibliometric analysis, and discuss the future challenges for AI methods from the life science research aspects. There is no doubt that AI technologies will continuously accelerate and revolutionize life science research in the future, in the meanwhile, the development of new AI methods more suitable for life science data is also in great needs.