The medical field has some characteristics that make it an attractive target for machine learning. The high stakes nature of correct disease diagnosis, coupled with over-worked and fatigued doctors, can lead to cases where patients with easily treatable diseases go undiagnosed and suffer greatly from this. Combined with a bottleneck in diagnoses due to the limited number of doctors available and expensive diagnosis costs, machine learning algorithms can appear very attractive for both patients and clinics to implement. If machine learning is able to take over the process of diagnosis, it would be able to process huge numbers of medical diagnoses, freeing up doctors to work directly on saving lives.
