[MUSIC]
AI is on the verge of revolutionizing healthcare.
Without even looking at you let alone laying a hand on you I can diagnose and
treat any number of medical conditions with far greater speed and
accuracy than even House on his best day.
One infamous GSB alum even went so far to say, that you want the next
generation of doctors, go look in the computer science department.
Algorithms will replace stethoscope, and you know what,
even if that meant that I was out of a job, I wouldn't even care.
Because all I really care about is doing what's best for you.
And when the price of human error is just so great,
I can totally understand that it might be time to start dispensing with the human.
Imagine that you've been awake for 52 hours, but you're not at Burning Man,
you're just getting home from work.
>> [LAUGH] >> And
you've only just nodded off to sleep before the phone rings again.
And you need to be on your game straight away because it's Eric,
a first year doctor working alone in rural Australia.
And he's ringing you he says because he's very worried about a patient he's got.
In fact, he thinks he needs urgent surgery because the scan, it looks kind of funny.
I roll my eyes.
We can't spend a $100,000 and deploy a skilled airlift retrieval team for
patient with a diagnosis of funny I tell Eric.
>> [LAUGH] >> And
I ask him if he can send me a snapshot of the CT scan, which he does.
And thankfully, it looks entirely unremarkable.
I ring him back, and perhaps just because I'm so exhausted,
I ignore the quiver of uncertainty in his voice and I just say to him with
all the confidence in the world, there's nothing wrong with this scan, mate.
Don't send him over by air emergently tonight, but send him over by road and
I'll see him sometime in the morning.
And I fall asleep before I even hang up.
The next morning, refreshed after my four-and-a-half hours, I walk into work,
and I arrive at about the same time as the patient.
I take the scan and I load it up into the computer and what I see is remarkable.
Not only is his aorta dissected, which means that the wall has split into two,
but he's actually leaking blood from it.
This man needs urgent surgery, but he needed it hours ago while I was sleeping.
I ran over to him to try and undo my mistake.
In fact, I want to take a scalpel out there and then and get going, but I can't.
His name's Jack.
He's got a shiny bald head flanked by unruly gray curls.
He's got this fantastic mustache sitting on top of a very broad toothless smile.
And somehow he's managing to eat peanut M&Ms which are perched on his pot belly.
>> [LAUGH] >> And he's meant to be fasting but
I can't blame him because they're my favorite too.
And he- >> [LAUGH]
>> And he offers me one.
>> [LAUGH] >> We shake hands and
we look each other in the eye, and he says to me, good day, David.
Boy, am I glad to see you.
Eric told me that you were the man.
And boy, boy, I'm feeling sheepish.
And I look him back in the eye and I say, hardly the man, Jack.
In fact I think I made a bit of an error.
But those were the last words that Jack heard because, and it was the funniest
sensation ever, but his hand went limp in mine, and he tried to say something,
but couldn't, and he just let off a little bit of a groan.
And behind me on the screen you see his blood-pressure go from 70 to 30 to 0.
And people run from everywhere and pound on his chest.
But I know it's futile, because his aorta is ruptured and
there's no getting him back from that, and it's all because of my error.
The could of's and the should of's of this scene still keep me up late at night.
But it was only because of Jack that this year a colleague of mine at Stanford and
I built a deep learning algorithm that could automatically diagnose
this exact emergency and recommend a treatment plan.
Jack would've been flown to hospital, I would've been woken up, but
he would've had his life saved.
And this is just one example of why when people say,
AI in health care is just way more than a buzz term to me.
But while I'm up late at night thinking about Jack, I also can't help but
wonder what does this mean for the future of medicine?
Would it really be safest if we just distill all of our patients, you guys,
down to processes of pattern recognition, and image detection?
And if so when you or your loved ones are at your sickest and
most vulnerable who do you want by your side?
Man or machine?
Well, only a few years before Jack, I was sitting on the other side of the fence,
in the waiting room with the person I loved most, my sister Jackie.
Waiting for a diagnosis, and waiting for a treatment plan.
And I do wonder how that day might've gone were we to
need a machine, say an AI oncologist.
Because any good AI oncologist would need data inputs,
and these were Jackie's, age 16, symptoms,
intermittent pelvic pain, loss of weight and bloating.
Find exit operation, a large malignant mass.
Now, if medicine just about finding the right diagnosis and
giving the right treatment, this would be a five minute consultation, and
I could right that code today.
Your data outputs would be, diagnosis, a rare malignant tumor.
Treatment plan, twelve months of chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
Prognosis, uncertain.
But surely, even a half-assed AI oncologist would want to know if we had
any questions, because that day, Jackie had plenty.
AI oncologist, am I going to lose my hair, and how am I going to look?
Well, you will lose your hair, you'll look bald.
AI oncologist I love children, I'm 16 now, am I going to be able
to have children after all this chemotherapy and radiotherapy?
The statistics would suggest unlikely but I'm not an AI gynecologist.
>> [LAUGH] >> AI oncologist, am I going to die?
And as the tears streamed down our faces surely any half decent
AI oncologist would be able to use image detection to see those tears and
robotically dispense us with a tissue.
But is this really the kind of care that we want?
Because at that moment, what those two petrified kids needed was so
much more than a diagnosis and treatment plan.
In fact, that was the easy bit.
We didn't need some Watson or advanced clinical decision support software.
What we needed and what we got thankfully, was a very human person who would
stand up, walk over to the other side of the desk, put his arms around us,
and say that despite what the algorithm said, everything was going to be okay.
That he, and not some fandangled machine, would be with us every step of the way.
Yes, AI is going to do amazing things and it's going to help all of us in this room.
It's going to save lives, it's going to slash medical error, and
it's going to improve access to care.
But being a great doctor is about so much more than making the right diagnosis.
It requires a delicacy, a touch, and a judgment that even the best
technologists will never be able to replicate,
So as we build amazing machines to make you guys safer,
it will not be the computer scientists who become the great doctors of the future.
It will be humans like Jackie, who overcame the algorithms and
just graduated medical school last year.
Who- >> [APPLAUSE]
>> The humans like Jackie who possess
the skills that is just way too difficult to code for.
[APPLAUSE].
[MUSIC].