Can AI be used in medicine?

AI is already being used in many ways in medicine and health related industries. Some examples: robot surgery for specific bone and organ operations; AI diagnosis of x-rays for breast and prostate cancer; automated testing of pathology samples; speeding up the development of new drugs; knowledge-based advice generation for medical staff. In many of these tasks the AI program can outperform humans. From this impressive progress you might think doctors will eventually become redundant. However, as IBM found when building their Watson system for answering questions about medical decisions, the best outcomes are always produced when humans and algorithms work in collaboration. We need to use AIs as tools with human oversight and combined with human judgement. The robot doctor might be a nice idea but they will never replace humans.