Healthcare is an obvious sector to deploy AI in. It generates tsunamis of data, vast amounts of money are spent on it, and there are plenty of opportunities to improve the quality of its products and services by making them more intelligent and intelligible. It is a mistake to think of healthcare as a single monolithic entity. Will Smart is the former CIO for the NHS in England, and he points out that healthcare carries out the activities of numerous different industries, including hotels, catering, research, professional services, janitorial services, logistics, manufacturing, and many others. What kinds of AI should healthcare managers be looking into?

In the fall of 1975, I entered medical school with ninety other students, most of us fresh out of college. We were an idealistic lot. Marcus Welby, M.D., about the kind family doctor with the ultimate bedside manner, was the hot medical TV show at the time, and Dr. Kildare reruns were still showing frequently. It was a simpler world of medicine--one with time to have a genuine relationship with patients. There were few medical procedures or fancy scans (beyond X-rays) or lab tests that could be ordered.

Many of us come across the term AI almost on a daily basis. It is a term that we associate with self-driving cars, talking robots and with future in general. Many of us in the medical fraternity are already looking at this as a potential threat. But, what exactly does this mean to medical practice? Extreme scenarios like robots taking over surgery without human interaction is unlikely. But there are certain aspects of medicine that computers are quite good at.

Healthcare is undoubtedly one of the most crucial sectors for any nation, and obviously a matter for governmental and the private sector's focus. The healthcare system is tasked to ensure that society stays healthy at a reasonable expense. The way healthcare organisations are managed impacts the professional growth and satisfaction of doctors, nurses, counsellors and other healthcare professionals. Yet healthcare is often under resourced; can innovations within the industry reduce costs and improve outcomes? Emerging technology is completely transforming the business models of hospitals and health providers, changing the work of care professionals forever.

For most people, medicine will fall into the latter category. But, while medical training gives the hard and fast facts, there is an element of creative thinking involved: an amalgamation of previous patient stories, watching and learning. More so than you might think, which is why it seems almost ludicrous to introduce machines into the world of medicine. Despite its backdrop of science, machine learning -- which, for some people, equals robots -- surely can't have a place in the medical world; surely these robots can't take the place of a doctor? But not in the way you might think.

You have heard of a thing called the Internet. Not really sure what it does, but apparently it is going to be really cool and will get really big with time. I choose that year, because that is when I first connected to the internet ( using Compuserve and a VERY slow dial-up modem). In any case, since you are reading this post, you know now, that things have gone far beyond anything we could have imagined back then in 1994. We could really say that things have grown Exponentially.

For most people, medicine will fall into the latter category. But, while medical training gives the hard and fast facts, there is an element of creative thinking involved: an amalgamation of previous patient stories, watching and learning. More so than you might think, which is why it seems almost ludicrous to introduce machines into the world of medicine. Despite its backdrop of science, machine learning -- which, for some people, equals robots -- surely can't have a place in the medical world; surely these robots can't take the place of a doctor? But not in the way you might think.

At times, progress occurs so quickly that it's difficult to separate science fiction from real life. Just five decades ago, computers were massive, unwieldy machines running on punch cards and primitive circuits. Today, a single smartphone has more processing power than the computer used on the Apollo missions. AI has benefited greatly from this explosion in computing power and capability. Today, highly complex deep learning algorithms, patterned on the structure of the human brain, can master Go, trade stocks, and even write Harry Potter novels (though admittedly not very good ones). Given this versatility, some fear that deep learning AIs will reshape our economy by force, rendering hundreds, if not thousands, of occupations obsolete.

The medical profession is under increasing pressure. A global shortfall in healthcare workers will reach 12.9 million by 2035, according to the World Health Organization. And in China, the shortage of healthcare professionals is even more acute. In response to this, Chinese search engine Baidu launched a medical chatbot named Melody, designed to speed up the process of diagnosing patients. Melody, announced in October, was created for Baidu's Doctor mobile app.

The dream of one day having an entity with artificial intelligence diagnose your condition and recommend the best treatment may still be years away, but at IBM Watson Health and elsewhere, the technology and capability is evolving at such a rapid pace that such a function could well be part of regular healthcare practices. About a month ago I interviewed Deborah DiSanzo, who is IBM's General Manager for Watson Health. She was previously the CEO of Phillips Healthcare but now spearheads the development of Watson Health into a multi-billion-dollar business unit for IBM. "I was at one of our larger partners who is actually using our application from IBM called Clinical Trial Matching, which enables oncologists to, from the hundreds of thousands of clinical trials that are going on, match the appropriate clinical trial to the patient. And the breast oncologist that I was speaking to said it is fantastic because it "enables me to speak to my patients better, I turn the screen around and I show her what the particular type of breast cancer she has, how that matches with the top three clinical trials that she could go on.""