Machine Learning – The Future of Human Healthcare?

Sometime recently the world of healthcare quietly changed and not many people noticed. IBM's artificially intelligent supercomputer Watson decided that it's (his?) prowess at Jeopardy was nothing more than a neat parlour trick and went to med school. Forbes reported that Watson waded through textbooks, medical databases PubMed and Medline and copious quantities of patient records from leading hospitals. "Watson has analysed 605,000 pieces of medical evidence, 2 million pages of text, 25,000 training cases and had the assist of 14,700 clinician hours fine-tuning its decision accuracy," according to Forbes. Supporters now claim that Dr. Watson is now the world's best diagnostician with consistent, accurate diagnoses based on access to essentially all known medical wisdom.