Technology, big data, and the future of paediatric neuroscience: let us go then, you and AI

We have all observed how great pioneers of paediatric neurology effortlessly drew on their vast reserves of knowledge and experience to make diagnoses based primarily on observation. In today's environment, individual clinicians see fewer cases, while medical science uncovers increasing numbers of often rare conditions. Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and big data promise to emulate, permanently represent, and make widely available the fruits of clinical experience. The concept of big data is not new: petabyte (1015 bytes)‐sized resources have informed particle physics, climate science, and genomics for decades.1 One may ask how big data can benefit a field increasingly dominated by rare diseases. It is axiomatic that genomic data is uninterpretable without phenotypic information, and readers will be familiar with SimulConsult (https://simulconsult.com), a machine learning‐based platform to assist the diagnosis of rare conditions in child neurology, sometimes with unexpected results.2