AI diagnostics are coming

Earlier this year, artificial intelligence scientist Sebastian Thrun and colleagues at Stanford University demonstrated that a "deep learning" algorithm was capable of diagnosing potentially cancerous skin lesions as accurately as a board-certified dermatologist. The cancer finding, reported in Nature, was part of a stream of reports this year offering an early glimpse into what could be a new era of "diagnosis by software," in which artificial intelligence aids doctors--or even competes with them. Unlike more-traditional vision software, where a programmer defines rules--for example, a stop sign has eight sides--in deep learning the algorithm finds the rules itself, but often without leaving an audit trail to explain its decisions. These covered 2,032 different diseases and included 1,942 images of confirmed skin cancers.