A writer at Pulmonology Advisor describes why clinical expertise will always be better than machine learning for diagnosing patients with pneumonia.
As an idea, machine learning — the field of computer science concerned with developing algorithms that can both learn from data and improve themselves without being explicitly programmed — represents something of an ideal for medical problem solving. In theory, these programs can ingest enormous quantities of information, discern the subtlest patterns (while simultaneously disregarding any distracting noise), and make meaningful and actionable predictions about future behaviors and outcomes.
[But] as intelligent as machine learning software promises to be, only human experts — doctors who have spent a lifetime making all the mistakes that can be made in their narrow field — are capable of preventing us from blindly following a misguided algorithm down the wrong rabbit hole.
