[epmaybe]

The diabetic retinopathy study (and the somewhat recent stanford dermatology study) were the first ML studies I had read about that blew me away in terms of their sensitivities and specificities, as compared to real doctors. Your comment on specific subtasks is perfect, and I try and use these examples when discussing ML with fellow medical students.

However, like you said, the medical field is very slow, and has quite a lot of inertia to maintain the status quo. Unless insurance companies refuse to compensate practitioners that don't use these tools, I fear that few, if any, in the healthcare field will opt to use such techniques.

And finally: How should someone with both a medical and computer science background get into ML?

[pak]

I found the Statistical Learning self paced course on Stanford's site to be a great formal intro to ML algorithms implemented in R, and it is taught by the inimitable Hastie and Tibshirani: http://statlearning.class.stanford.edu

This post on ML in medicine is a pretty good overview of everything that has been going on recently and the nuances often lost in the current hype: https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2016/11/27/do-compute...