Artificial Intelligence In Medicine – Maximizing the benefits

Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence has started working with the doctors and computers at London's Royal Free Hospital Trust; many of the first questions being asked concentrate on data security and patient confidentiality. About 1.6m patients a month are seen by the three hospitals that the Trust covers and, according to an agreement seen by the New Scientist magazine, the data includes patient information from the past five years. That data can't be used by Google in any other part of its business, it is stored by a third party and will have to be destroyed/given back when the agreement ends, according to the New Scientist. Google wants to apply machine learning to mine the data and help doctors by predicting care needs – both at the level of the individual patient and the wider community. If the pilot works then implications are huge: clever new algorithms will help make healthcare better and be more efficient at treatment. Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) could predict the outbreak of infectious diseases from scattered hospital admissions data before a human expert has noticed.