Artificial intelligence may be a boost to medicine

It won't be long before the computers put us all out of jobs. For the medical field, it looks like some of us will be out of a job before others. An exciting study from the Netherlands utilized computerized analysis of pathologic slides to look for metastatic breast cancer in lymph nodes in specimens from women with known breast cancer. Finding metastatic cancer in a lymph node is an important indicator for recurrence of disease if untreated, a prognostic sign, and a reason to undergo more extensive treatment. Obviously, doing whatever we can to accurately and thoroughly assess such tissue is extremely important.