Radiologists are often in short supply and overworked - deep learning to the rescue

Deep learning, the AI subset of machine learning that uses neural network algorithms to identify patterns in data, is proving to be extremely effective at analyzing digital representations of sensory information: images, sounds, even odors. The recent explosion in deep learning research is partly due to significant investments by online services like Baidu, Facebook, Google and Microsoft aimed at providing automatic identification and categorization of photos and videos to improve search accuracy, ad targeting, marketing data collection and other commercial uses. However, research into image processing and pattern recognition have origins that long precede the era of cat videos and vacation pictures. Early efforts focused on military applications that provide a glimpse at the far-reaching ramifications of recent research. Now, the flow of technology is reversed, from often trivial consumer uses to life-saving implementations of deep learning in medicine, agriculture and search and rescue.