Artificial intelligence in health care: within touching distance

Replacing the doctor with an intelligent medical robot is a recurring theme in science fiction, but the idea of individualised medical advice from digital assistants like Alexa or Siri, supported by self-surveillance smartphone data, no longer seems implausible. A scenario in which medical information, gathered at the point of care, is analysed using sophisticated machine algorithms to provide real-time actionable analytics seems to be within touching distance. Medical practice has so far been largely unchanged by the digital revolution that has disrupted so many other industries, but perhaps artificial intelligence (AI) will provide the improvements in medical care and research promised for so long. At its inception in the 1950s, the central goal of AI research was to produce a system with general intelligence capable of passing the so-called Turing test, the display of intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from that of a human being. Through the past 60 years, the field has experienced several cycles of excitement and disillusionment with seemingly little progress, but since 2010 substantial success has been made in deep learning, producing systems able to learn without having to be explicitly programmed, by building a model from sample inputs.