No book on healthcare analytics would be complete without a discussion of deep learning. In recent years, unparalleled results have been achieved in the areas of speech recognition, face recognition, language understanding, and object identification using deep learning algorithms (Goodfellow et al., 2016). Almost in tandem have been the breakthroughs in healthcare; from cancer detection on pathology slides and radiology scans to predicting mortality and readmissions, time and time again, results are being seen that rival (and in some cases surpass) committees of expert physicians.

We have already discussed some aspects of deep learning briefly. In Chapter 1, Introduction to Healthcare Analytics, we discussed a historical paper that is seen by many to have been a seminal event for deep learning as a field, in Chapter 3, Machine Learning Foundations...