Artificial intelligence isn't just a tool for pure tech -- health care providers can use it too. Clinical practice and AI go together, three top health care leaders at national enterprises agreed during a panel at Transform 2021 hosted by VentureBeat general manager Shuchi Rana. Using data to reduce medical waste and over-testing can help hospital systems save money, said Dr. Doug Melton, head of clinical and customer analytics at Evernorth, a subsidiary of insurance giant Cigna. "Before, we had unsupervised learning, and it was harder to do. You had to be prescriptive in your hypotheses," Melton said.

Pocket-size ultrasound devices that cost 50 times less than the machines in hospitals (and connect to your phone). These are just some of the innovations now transforming medicine at a remarkable pace. No one can predict the future, but it can at least be glimpsed in the dozen inventions and concepts below. Like the people behind them, they stand at the vanguard of health care. Neither exhaustive nor exclusive, the list is, rather, representative of the recasting of public health and medical science likely to come in the 2020s.

Verge Genomics is taking a novel approach to speed drug discovery for devastating neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and ALS. Rather than spending exhaustive time with animal testing, the San Francisco-based company goes straight to the source. "To succeed in humans, you need to start with humans," says CEO Alice Zhang, whose drug discovery combines artificial intelligence with human genomics. Animal testing can be successful in predicting success for some drugs, but when it comes to neurodegenerative diseases, human brains are far more complex. To keep human patients at the center of the drug discovery process, Zhang's company has built one of the largest databases of brain tissue sequences in the world, with tissue from more than 1,000 human brains.

Robin E. was folding laundry when she heard her son talking to Alexa downstairs in a soft, hopeful voice. The 5-year-old was asking, "Alexa, will you be my friend?" Robin held her breath, waiting tensely for Alexa's response. Finally, she heard the assistant say, brightly, "I'm happy to be your friend." Robin and her husband have an Echo Spot in their bedroom and an Echo Show on their kitchen counter.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is continuing to make waves in the life sciences industry, with today's announcement that a drug-discovery company called Verge Genomics has landed $32 million in Series A financing. Based in San Francisco, Verge Genomics uses machine learning and sprawling data sets to identify new therapeutics for neurological diseases. Since its founding in 2015, the startup has nurtured "lead therapeutic programs" and built proprietary genomic data sets for Parkinson's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Investors nodded to those advances and Verge Genomics' roster of diverse experts when they announced the windfall. Read: Which Health-Tech Startups Are Making Money in 2018?

Designers will succeed programmers as the kings of Silicon Valley, machines will become as smart as humans, and ambient computing will supplant smartphones in the next few years. Those are three of the top 10 trends coming in technology, according to five venture capitalists who made their predictions Wednesday night at a local Silicon Valley institution. The Top 10 Tech Trends event has been held annually for the past 18 years by the Churchill Club, which hosts forums with tech's top executives, financiers, entrepreneurs, and thinkers. The criteria for the trends are that they must not be obvious and that they will take off within five years, though both rules are frequently broken. Few of the predictions directly involved traditional enterprise computing, which customarily is focused on the nearer-term trends, but virtually all of them are enabled by heavyweight enterprise technologies.