Imagine if your doctor could compare your physical health, diet and lifestyle to a thousand Americans with similar characteristics, and realize that you need treatment to prevent heart failure next month.

What if an analysis of your genome could help a physician give you a customized cancer treatment that saves your life?

Unleashing the modern power of computers, data crunching and artificial intelligence could revolutionize health care, improving and extending lives.

Its the kind of potential Google chief executive Larry Page hinted at when he told The New York Times earlier this year that wed probably save 100,000 lives next year, if we data mined health care data.

Imagine you had the ability to search peoples medical records in the U.S., Page said in another interview this summer. I imagine that would save 10,000 lives in the first year.

Pages numbers sound impressive, but are speculative and unfounded, according to many in the medical industry.

Interviews with more than a dozen health care professionals and data scientists found no evidence backing Pages specific claims. While they universally agree that data mining the examination and analysis of huge batches of information could invigorate health care, they caution that any sort of accurate estimate would be impossible.

Usually when I see someone put a number on it and throw around saving lives it usually means one, they arent usually a clinician or someone who provides care, or No. 2 its someone who really knows better, but is trying to grab a headline, said Nicholas Marko, the department head of data science at the Geisinger Medical Center.

A Google spokeswoman declined to offer an explanation of Pages numbers, or make him available for comment.

In one other instance where Page has used an unsubstantiated health care statistic, he told Time Magazine last year that solving cancer would only add about three years to peoples average life expectancy. Thats a figure the American Cancer Society and National Cancer Institute had never heard of before. A Google spokeswoman didnt have an answer when asked for an explanation.

Read more here:

Health Care Eyes Power, Pitfalls of Data Mining