AI-enhanced instrumentation - the fusion of deep learning and medical sensors creates dramatic improvements

Part of what fuels societal angst about the use of increasingly sophisticated, quasi-autonomous algorithms collectively known as AI is the fear that machines will supplant people in an ever-growing number of jobs. While this is undoubtedly true and has been for every prior generation of new technology from the power loom to the backhoe, the more significant question is whether AI replaces or merely displaces people? Namely, does it lead to the unemployed or to the differently employed. Medicine is one of the most promising areas of AI development and as I discussed last week, in hospitals and clinics there's a good argument that deep learning (DL) will augment human expertise, not supersede it. Ground zero of the DL disruption in medicine is imaging, however as my column pointed out, experts are optimistic that AI will make for better radiologists, not fewer.