Machine Learning and the Profession of Medicine

The profession of medicine has a tremendous opportunity and an obligation to oversee the application of technology to patient care. To do so, medicine, which is only now becoming comfortable with the electronic medical record, needs to continue with the digital revolution. Business has already embraced this degree of innovation, leveraging the momentum in the technology sector that is driven by the confluence of 3 key factors: first, massive amounts of available data; second, advances in computational processing, including developments in distributed computing; and third, breakthroughs in machine learning, in which computational algorithms learn from raw data, without human instruction. Machine learning algorithms personalize search engines, keep spam out of email inboxes, and steer self-driving cars. Computational capacity and machine learning allow massive amounts of data to be analyzed rapidly, laying the groundwork for personalized medicine mediated by technology. Here, Darcy et al discuss the applications of machine learning in medicine.