A new AI method can train on medical records without revealing patient data

When Google announced that it would absorb DeepMind's health division, it sparked a major controversy over data privacy. Though DeepMind confirmed that the move wouldn't actually hand raw patient data to Google, just the idea of giving a tech giant intimate, identifying medical records made people queasy. This problem with obtaining lots of high-quality data has become the biggest obstacle to applying machine learning in medicine. To get around the issue, AI researchers have been advancing new techniques for training machine-learning models while keeping the data confidential. The latest method, out of MIT, is called a split neural network: it allows one person to start training a deep-learning model and another person to finish.