A Google Brain scientist turns to AI to make medicine more personal

The artificial intelligence Maithra Raghu studies at Google Brain doesn't have a bedside manner. But she's betting it can still help restore a deeply human, disappearing aspect of modern medicine: personal connection. In a health care system flooded with paperwork and patient data, Raghu sees a natural place for neural networks, which analyze vast amounts of information to find patterns that escape the human eye and use them to churn out diagnoses or health care predictions. To her, the technology could prove to be a powerful tool for processing data that can spare providers more time to spend with patients one-on-one. "Machine learning isn't a magic tool here," said Raghu, a senior research scientist who was recently named a STAT Wunderkind.