One of the largest AI platforms in healthcare is one you've never heard of, until now

For years, advocates have hyped Artificial Intelligence's (AI) potential to do for healthcare what it's doing for other industries – personalize recommendations, prioritize searches, and tag pictures. Investments have reflected the excitement, with the healthcare AI market expected to reach $6.6B by 2021. "People see smart computers all around them – Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Tesla's self-driving car – and they think healthcare should be the same. Obviously, healthcare is far more complex, requires much higher accuracy, and has less margin for error," said Dr. Michael Blum, Associate Vice Chancellor for Informatics, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), speaking on the topic ahead of last year's Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) annual conference. However, disparate efforts, different systems, massive amounts of data and layers of complexity have meant the industry remains largely unchanged. Fortunately, most hospitals have at least one thing in common: imaging machines – the technology radiologists use to scan, diagnose and treat patients and the largest generator of healthcare data.