Remember the film “Terminator” and “IRobot.” Back in the 1980s, the director of Terminator “James Cameron” got acclaim for the story line. The reason – he thought far ahead of his time. And IRobot dealt with a supercomputer going against its own creators, humans. In those days, the storyline seemed like fiction. But came 2010. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have made fantasy and fiction seem real. Now, you have the chat bots for answering customer care queries in private banks. You also have robots in Japan that specialize in customer interaction. And when tech improvements are happening in every industry, can health care be far behind? In this article of artificial intelligence in healthcare, let us focus on how artificial intelligence can play a role in health care.
What aspect comes to your mind when you visualize about artificial intelligence? Many say it is a robotic doctor who performs surgery on patients. In a decade, there will be possibilities. And it is science fiction come true. Take the idea of individual service from speech recognition assistants such as Siri. It can make way for a robot to perform surgery supported by self surveillance. But a human has to monitor in the initial stages. In the next stage, medical information along with surgery algorithms can provide guidance to a robot. to perform surgery in the future. Yes, the challenges are immense, but there will be a definite positive result. Till now, medical science has so far remained a distance from the digital revolution. But, with AI coming to the industry, medical science will have many more technological innovations. For the benefit of humans, that is for sure.
Beginning Stages and Recent Innovations
AI was first introduced in the 1950s. At that time, the main goal of any AI research is to design software with general intelligence capabilities that can pass the Turing Test. But now in 2018, the field has gone through many stages of changes, positive and negative.
AI experts have designed new systems and tools that can learn by themselves. In other words through permutations and combinations. The technology has improved at such a fast pace. Some examples are speech recognition, face recognition for security purposes. The others are self driving vehicles, text translation and image classification.
Deep learning has produced AI systems that can outperform the human brain. For example, the Games, Go and Jeopardy. Yes, there are multiple data to get analyzed, but the processing power has increased. When it comes to image security in ATMs in private bank, the technology used is deep learning techniques.
Artificial Intelligence in Health Care
Now, with AI stepping into healthcare, the use of deep neural networks has come out successful for skin cancer analysis. The AI tool predicted the result more accurate than a dermatologist. Yes, data has to be perfect. And in this stage, the machine can only predict from the learning techniques, not beyond. And do not forget, that health data has to get changed to text. Then extraction of information and uploading to the desired format for AI is a complicated task.
Yes, there is a lot of excitement surrounding this AI technology, but only few have evolved successfully. But imagine the challenges. A large amount of clinical data has to get shared and then converted to text. In other words, confidential information about patients can get leaked. Some patients may object to this sharing of their personal data. For example, IBM Watson in combination with MD Anderson Cancer Centre had a project. Now it has been stalled after four years of development. Then there was Google Deep Mind’s partnership with Royal Free London NHS Foundation trust. This project faced problems because patient data had to get shared. We have given just two examples. In short, legal hassles can come in the way for AI development in healthcare.
Changes Brought About By Artificial Intelligence in Health Care
The year 2017 has brought a considerable change in AI in combination with health care. A strong relationship between clinicians, doctors, data scientists and AI experts has been formed. It has started to yield positive results. Yes, similar to the villain super computer in IRobot, chances are that evil human brains can make use of the advantages to indulge in commercial exploitation. But that is far in the future. At the present, every expert has to join hands to produce a system that can help human life in healthcare. The data that has to get uploaded should be precise to the dot, AI technology in healthcare will receive a boost.
It is true, AI has caused quite an impact in many of the industries including healthcare. And in the process, hospitals, machine learning, automation, insurance companies and every industry with relation to health care have got a positive impact.
As per a survey done in 2016, about eight percent of healthcare service companies in various sectors, use AI technology. Banks have already pumped billions in AI to put together the best security software online. Compared to this industry, healthcare has invested very low. But in the next five years, healthcare organizations are expected to spend millions on AI technologies.
So, what are the simple ways implementation of AI has happened in the healthcare industry? Let us find out.
1. Management of Medical Records
Data management is crucial to AI and automation. Instead of humans, robots can store, collect and trace data.
2. Repetitive Jobs
In recent times, X-rays, analyzing tests, data entry and CT scans are done by humans. As the years progress, robots will be doing these manual tasks. Two disciplines that need precise analysis are radiology and cardiology. And when AI comes into these sectors, they can give accurate results than a human being. A human doctor need only look into those cases, which are more complicated.
3. Treatment Method
AI systems can analyze data from external files, research, medical reports, and clinical notes to suggest the best treatment for a patient.
4. Digital Consultation
There are apps such as Babylon, which takes into account the symptoms suggested by a patient to give medical consultation. It then digs into its records and compares the patient’s medical history to suggest the treatment.
5. Virtual Nurses
One of the popular nurses in the world is Molly. This digital nurse program assists people to give reminders regarding treatment and monitor the condition of patient. It uses machine learning to help patients.
There are many implementations of Artificial Intelligence in health care, but we have focused on only five benefits.
Conclusion
In this article, we have touched only few aspects of AI with relation to healthcare. Do you know, AI has also touched the fitness industry? Let us imagine a situation. You are in Bangalore and work as a software engineer. But you rarely get time to exercise to remain fit. You feel to take the guidance of a personal trainer who can come to your home.
Now, instead of searching for referrals, you can download the app of the best home maintenance companies in Bangalore. These companies have in their payrolls, the best fitness trainers in Bangalore. You can check the ratings, and hire him or her. Now, if you plan to visit the website, there is the chat option. But the person who is in conversation with you may be a chatbot. Yet, you can get the best fitness trainer in Bangalore for training within a short time.
