From Identifying Dog Breeds to Diagnosing Diabetic Retinopathy

Abstract

Experts predict advances in artificial intelligence (AI)—the ability of a machine to mimic human cognition—will spark the fourth industrial revolution, but the dawn of a new age in diagnostic medicine may already be on the horizon. Google and others are leveraging deep learning, a subset of AI that aims to imitate the neuronal processing of the human brain, to screen for diseases—such as diabetic retinopathy, cardiovascular disease, brain tumours, skin cancers, and stroke—at unprecedented levels of sensitivity and specificity. Limitations include an inability to wholly substitute for human empathy and touch, a vulnerability for adversarial training, and concerns about interpretability. If hurdles can be properly dealt with, the coalescence of big data and AI research will change how medicine is provided, practiced, and accessed.