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Artificial intelligence will cure health care. And revolutionize medicine as we know it. That's according to a slew of headlines this week, including the cover of Newsweek. The prevailing narrative goes that Silicon Valley's technology companies, like Alphabet and IBM, will bring super-computing to medicine, thus transforming a $3 trillion broken sector. Cha-ching. Computers will detect complex diagnoses in piles of medical images in overrun clinics, and that's just the beginning. But as digital health futurist Maneesh Juneja pointed out this week, there's a difference between hype and hope. So CNBC interviewed a half-dozen doctors to find out what they think. Tweet: As far as I can tell, zero doctors have been quoted in this story.

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The first takeaway: doctors seemed to have different ideas about the meaning of the term "AI." Some thought it broadly referred to tools to help with their decision-making; others suggested it involved neural networks and machine learning. Tom Oates, a nephrologist in the UK, said it's "almost become an advertising tag line which few people can define." Such marketing also didn't matter much to Ethan Weiss, a cardiologist at UC San Francisco. "I don't care what they say it is," he said. "I care about the input and the output."

I don't care what they say it is; I care about the input and the output. Ethan Weiss UCSF cardiologist

Despite his aversion to jargon, Weiss was among the most optimistic of the group. In recent weeks, he's closely followed the developments of UK-based Alphabet company DeepMind, which taught computers to master an ancient game called Go. For Weiss, what mattered is how the computer "changed the way the game gets made" after thousands of years of humans playing it. He hopes that Google might somehow figure out ways to crack complex problems like obesity by understanding the biological factors that drive people to gain weight or put weight back on. The hope, he said, "is to be unbiased and let the data tell us how to do things." The specific applications that he finds most compelling are areas with "clean data-sets," which include pathology and radiology. He also thinks computers might do a better job at interpreting electrocardigrams, which display electrical activity with the heart. Finding good data is a big challenge for AI, many of the doctors pointed out. Medicine has a lot of shades of gray, making it difficult to agree on ground train and train AI to diagnose most conditions. What Weiss doesn't believe will happen is that computers will replace his job or cure America's health system. That is a much more complex feat that can't be solved with a tech bandaid. At best, he said, "I hope it will help me do things that I don't want to do."

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