Computers are commonly used to assist in diagnosis. You might want to look up computer-assisted diagnosis[1]. If I am to believe my machine learning lecturers,

Computers are commonly used to assist in diagnosis. You might want to look up computer-assisted diagnosis[1]. If I am to believe my machine learning lecturers, their use is actually a bit more widespread than what the wikipedia page describes. Anyway, I think it is likely to see a transition to computers diagnosing and doctors just checking the results; at least for some areas. If you have a diagnosis and patient information I guess it isn't that difficult to come up with a treatment. I think that doctors themselves basically memorize decision trees. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-aided_diagnosis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-aided_diagnosis