Dr. Eric Topol talks AI's potential to personalize medicine, curb mistakes, bring back the human to…

Healthy looks a little bit different on everyone. We vary in what foods are best for our health, the shape of our bodies and even our natural abnormalities. These variances can make personalizing medicine difficult.

But artificial intelligence and new technologies could not only help personalize medicine, they also have the potential to help prevent mistakes, according to Dr. Eric Topol, founder and director of Scripps Research Translational Institute and professor at Scripps Research.

“The point is human data is going to change medicine, everybody here recognizes that,” Topol said at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose yesterday. “It is going to empower patients even more and make the lives of clinicians far better. The point that is essential is recognizing that each human being is unique, but we didn’t have the tools to understand that until recently.”

There are already tools that are making it cheaper and faster to diagnosose, according to Topol. He gave the example of mobile ultrasound technology, which enables ultrasound images to appear on a smartphone.