DeepMind, the digital brain foundry owned by Googles parent company, Alphabet, wants to use artificial intelligence to solve well, everything. Last year, its software taught itself to play the strategy game Go better than any human on the planet. For its next trick, it wants to move beyond games to a very real-world problem: health care.The London company has a fast-growing divisionnow 100 strongdedicated to health. And while DeepMinds research on Go may be years away from yielding practical applications, its health-care work is affecting peoples lives today through projects with the U.K.s National Health Service. These include a mobile app to alert doctors and nurses to changes in a patients condition and efforts to research whether computers can analyze various kinds of medical imagery as well as experienced doctors. The company believes AI has the power to save lives. But DeepMinds maiden voyage into the field has also run smack into an iceberg of privacy and ethical concernsand the resulting controversy has threatened to sink its ambitions of using AI to transform health care.In July, after a year-long investigation, U.K. regulators ruled that Londons Royal Free Hospital had illegally provided DeepMind access to 1.6 million patient records going back five years. DeepMind said it needed the records to conduct safety testing of its first product, a mobile app that gives doctors and nurses instant access to medical records and can alert them to patients at risk of deterioration. The first potentially fatal condition DeepMind built an alert for was acute kidney injury (AKI). The Royal Free said it accepts the decision, but disagrees it could have tested the mobile app, called Streams, another way.

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