Rise of the machines: will artificial intelligence replace the urologist?

Artificial intelligence (AI) – "the mimicking of human cognition by computers" – is a rapidly expanding field within medicine [1,2]. There is increasing evidence that AI may enhance the delivery of healthcare [1]. A well-known example is an AI system known as'Watson' created by IBM which is a decision support tool towards the diagnosis and management of oncology patients at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center [1]. As practitioners of medicine, we spend a lifetime refining our intuition with hard earned knowledge and skills to acquire the mindset for sophisticated decision-making in our increasingly complex patients. However, Watson can pull information and make decisions based on millions of such human physicians' life-time experiences, medical reports, patient records, clinical trials and published literature [1].