Machine learning and the future of otolaryngology

If you are over 30 years of age, you have witnessed a technology revolution that has grossly affected how we live: computers have come from being an oddity to an everyday feature in our households and places of work; the cellphone is ubiquitous; hardcopy letters by mail are rare as we can communicate instantaneously through email. And yet, what we have witnessed is only the beginning. Drs Hughes and Agrawal give us a glimpse of what is still to come, and what will be featured at the IFOS World Congress in Vancouver. Over the last five years there have been significant advances in high performance computing that have led to enormous scientific breakthroughs in the field of machine learning (a form of artificial intelligence), especially with regard to image processing and data analysis. These breakthroughs now affect multiple aspects of our lives, from the way our phone sorts and recognises photographs, to automated translation and transcription services, and have the potential to revolutionise the practice of medicine.