Artificial intelligence powers digital medicine

While this reality has become more tangible in recent years through consumer technology, such as Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri, the applications of AI software are already widespread, ranging from credit card fraud detection at VISA to payload scheduling operations at NASA to insider trading surveillance on the NASDAQ. Broadly defined as the imitation of human cognition by a machine, recent interest in AI has been driven by advances in machine learning, in which computer algorithms learn from data without human direction.1 Most sophisticated processes that involve some form of prediction generated from a large data set use this type of AI, including image recognition, web-search, speech-to-text language processing, and e-commerce product recommendations.2 AI is increasingly incorporated into devices that consumers keep with them at all times, such as smartphones, and powers consumer technologies on the horizon, such as self-driving cars. And there is anticipation that these advances will continue to accelerate: a recent survey of leading AI researchers predicted that, within the next 10 years, AI will outperform humans in transcribing speech, translating languages, and driving a truck.3 Despite a flurry of recent discussion about the role and meaning of AI in medicine, in 2017 nearly 100% of U.S. healthcare will be delivered with 0% AI involvement.