Machine learning is the new key to healthcare

As healthcare professionals are facing massive pressure not only to ensure the quality of care, but also to come up with new solutions, cures and treatments, they are becoming increasingly dependent on advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). But it is hardly a smooth partnership. The issues of skills shortages at the entry-level and of "messy data" in leveraging patient records at the high end are merely book-ends for a range of challenges that span these fields. Last week's annual Amazon Web Services Re:Invent conference, one of the largest cloud-focused events in the world, saw the launch or demonstration of a range of new cloud-based tools that are ideal for health research and treatment. ML, defined as computer algorithms that improve automatically through experience, was at the heart of these.