The opportunities and challenges of AI in health care
February 14, 2017
This article was first published by VentureBeat.
When we asked dozens of venture capitalists where they see the most potential for applied artificial intelligence, they unanimously agreed on health care. Technology has already been used to incrementally improve patient medical records, care delivery, diagnostic accuracy, and drug development, but with AI we could achieve exponential breakthroughs.
Deep learning first caught the media’s attention when a team from the lab of Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto won a Merck drug discovery competition despite having no experience with molecular biology and pharmaceutical development. Recently, a multidisciplinary research team at Stanford’s School of Medicine comprised of pathologists, biomedical engineers, geneticists, and computer scientists developed deep learning algorithms that diagnose lung cancer more accurately than human pathologists.
The ultimate dream in health care is to eradicate disease entirely. Through our healthcare AI interviews, we learned this dream might be possible one day with the assistance of AI, but we have a very, very long way to go.