Why the Healthcare Industry Is Hacking Graphics Technology to Power Machine Intelligence

The ability to decipher the mystifying amount of data will have a profound impact on our health and healthcare systems, including the prediction and treatment of diseases.

Artificial intelligence has attracted significant attention recently, and yet many of the most popular examples we’ve seen demonstrating its potential benefits have been esoteric proof-of-concepts, such as mastering chess or finding cat videos on the internet. While these developments have helped pave the way for further breakthroughs, they’ve also left many people asking where the tangible benefits are and what the era of machine intelligence really means to the real world.

Raja Koduri, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect, Radeon Technologies Group
At last, we’re reaching the tipping point where machine intelligence efforts are beginning to move past these preliminary examples into life-changing breakthroughs that can solve heretofore unsolvable problems. Nowhere is this more evident than in healthcare.

Healthcare is one of the most data-rich industries in the world. Record-keeping is an integral practice, and one that’s been made infinitely more accessible as health systems around the world have moved to electronic records. Diagnostic images, X-rays, CT scans, and MRI results are being stored digitally. While all these efforts have been made to reduce cost and increase the ease and effectiveness of patient care, in the era of machine intelligence they now create deep data lakes for analysis. This enables new research and pattern-finding that vastly exceeds the capabilities of human beings...