Unlocking the Power of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data in Medicine

Data-driven science and its corollaries in machine learning and the wider field of artificial intelligence have the potential to drive important changes in medicine. However, medicine is not a science like any other: It is deeply and tightly bound with a large and wide network of legal, ethical, regulatory, economical, and societal dependencies. As a consequence, the scientific and technological progresses in handling information and its further processing and cross-linking for decision support and predictive systems must be accompanied by parallel changes in the global environment, with numerous stakeholders, including citizen and society. What can be seen at the first glance as a barrier and a mechanism slowing down the progression of data science must, however, be considered an important asset. Only global adoption can transform the potential of big data and artificial intelligence into an effective breakthroughs in handling health and medicine. This requires science and society, scientists and citizens, to progress together.