The struggle to merge AI with healthcare

Fred Trotter, in his article, AI will eventually drive healthcare, but not anytime soon, says that the merging of artificial intelligence and healthcare is tougher than many realize. On the search space problem he writes:

Any person even reasonably informed about AI knows about Go, an ancient game with simple rules. Those simple rules hide the fact that Go is a very complex game indeed. For a computer, it is much harder to play than chess.

Almost since the dawn of computing, chess was regarded as something that required intelligence and was therefore a good test of AI. In 1997, the world chess champion was beaten by a computer. In the year after, a professional Go player beat the best Go software in the world with a 25 stone handicap. Artificial intelligence experts study Go carefully precisely because it is so hard for computers. The approach that computers take toward being smart — thinking of lots of options really fast — stops working when the number of options skyrockets, and the number of potentially right answers also becomes enormous. Most significantly, Go can always be made more computationally difficult by simply expanding the board.

Make no mistake, the diagnosis and treatment of human illness is like Go. It's not like chess. Khosla is making a classic AI mistake, presuming that because he can discern the rules easily, it means the game is simple. Chess has far more complex rules than Go, but it ends up being a simpler game for computers to play.

To be great at Go, software must learn to ignore possibilities, rather than searching through them. In short, it must develop "Go instincts." The same is true for any software that could claim to be a diagnostician.

How can you tell when software diagnosticians are having search problems? When they cannot tell the difference between all of the "right" answers to a particular problem. The average doctor does not need to be told "could it be Zebra Fever?" by a computer that cannot tell that it should have ignored any zebra-related possibilities because it is not physically located in Africa. (No zebras were harmed in the writing of this article, and I do not believe there is a real disease called Zebra Fever.)

Trotter also discusses what he calls the good data problem. Read more here.