Why Doctors Aren't Afraid of Better, More Efficient AI Diagnosing Cancer

Here's one reason why artificial intelligence is definitely in our medical future: "A.I. don't get tired," Roberto Novoa, a dermatologist based at Stanford, said. "You can show them literally thousands or millions of images, and there's little additional cost to each one that's analyzed." That's huge for a profession that has long been criticized for its physicians, residents, nurses, and other support staff running on next to no sleep. Even with sleep, a human radiologist may analyze an image wrong: They might get fatigued after several hours, or be inclined to identify something as, say, a particular melanoma after having identified it several-hundred times over. The algorithm, on the other hand, will give you the same answer it would have given at any other time, whether it's 2:00 a.m. on Saturday or 3:00 p.m. on a Wednesday.