From medical images to multiple-biomarker microarrays

A favorite cliché, often attributed to Yogi Berra, is "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future!" In this brief review, we shall recall some historical difficulties in predicting the future of diagnostic medical imaging--in particular, the modern technologies of CT and MRI--and examine the analogous situation in the emerging technology of diagnostic microarrays for the multiple-biomarker problem. All of these technologies began their lives as ill-conditioned problems, i.e., there was insufficient data to solve the central problem at hand.