Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: Hope or Hype?

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is on the rise in the technology sector and has become a buzz-worthy topic in many corners of our digital world. The application of AI in the medical field holds great promise for improving patient health, but will doctors and patients feel comfortable using it? Young startups have begun leveraging this technology to prove better health outcomes, but there's still a lot to do before we'll see AI used pervasively in the clinic. To date, the sweet spot in healthcare AI has been pairing algorithms with structured exercises in reading patient data and medical images to train machines to detect abnormalities. This training is called "deep learning." In the same way, algorithms are being used to sift through vast amounts of medical literature to inform treatment decisions where it would be too onerous a task to have a human read through the same journals.