AI and Medical Diagnosis

AI and Medical Diagnosis

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are getting smarter every passing moment. Some complex tasks like driving and understanding natural language are already being allotted to AI, but can we move a step further? In this article, we look at prospects of using AI for medical diagnosis.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around for quite some time now. Over time, systems equipped with AI are getting wiser than ever. AI started out as computer programs that could play complicated games. Deep Blue was the first chess-playing computer software to beat the then reigning world champion – Garry Kasparov. Soon, we had AI that could play even more complex games.. However, apart from bashing us at games, AI has been helping us with precise search results, data structuring, cybersecurity enhancement, and even digitizing age-old books. And now experts believe that AI for medical diagnosis can aid our doctors or even replace them in the near future.

Do We Need AI in Medical Diagnosis?

Time is the most valuable resource in healthcare. Medical response delayed by a few minutes could mean death for a patient suffering with a heart stroke. Even for terminally-ill patients, an early diagnosis means a few more days to spend with friends and family. However, not all doctors can attend their patients for as long as they would like. WebMD owned Medscape reported in its Physician Compensation Report 2016 that doctors hardly get up to 13 – 16 minutes to attend each patient. The patient’s entire course of treatment has to be charted or corrected by the diagnosis carried out in these minutes. A worrying trend is portrayed in a recent research. The research mentions how American physicians are spending up to two-thirds of their work-hours in entering data and stay engrossed in paperwork. If we could automate the diagnosis, doctors would be able to spend a lot more time with their patients or could attend to more patients leading to better healthcare delivery. AI can make this happen.

Are AI Doctors Here?

AI learns to think as humans do with a concept called deep learning. Deep learning utilizes broad sets of sample data to create decision trees by itself. Such skills are of great importance because this is how humans are thought to gain expertise in skills. With deep learning, AI can now think like humans, if not better, and can thereby be deemed fit to carry out medical tasks. Google has developed an AI eye doctor that has been trained to report leaky and fragile blood vessels at the back of an eye, which are symptoms of poorly controlled diabetes. AI is now helping in diagnosing real patients in India. China-based Infervison has developed an AI system with GE Healthcare, Cisco, and Nvidia that is trained to analyze computerized tomography (CT) scans and X-rays to detect lesions and nodules that could be early symptoms of lung cancer.

As AI systems start diagnosing patients, they also keep looking for patterns among patients with same illnesses. Over time, these patterns can lay the foundation for predicting diseases before they are manifested. With each developing AI for medical diagnosis, healthcare delivery is improving significantly for potentially everyone.

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  • Dave Cameron

    Artificial intelligence has an unimaginable potential in the healthcare industry.

  • Ross Quintana

    AI will revolutionise our lives

  • Bilal Shafiq

    The use of artificial intelligence in medicine could organize patient routes or treatment plans better, and also provide physicians with literally all the information they need to make a good decision.

  • Mark Platt

    Great information, thanks for the insight.

  • Emma Samson

    Thanks for sharing I really learned some great and important lessons which could be derived from AI and medical diagnosis

  • Brian Tracy

    The race is on and the A.I. track is growing increasingly crowded

  • Jeremy Cruz

    Artificial intelligence already found several areas in healthcare to revolutionize starting from the design of treatment plans through the assistance in repetitive jobs to medication management or drug creation. And it is only the beginning.

  • Martin Dennis

    The Babylon app offers an appropriate course of action. This app reminds patients to take their medication, and follow up to find out how they’re feeling. Through such solutions, the efficiency of diagnosing patients can increase by multiple times, while the waiting time in front of doctor’s examining rooms could drop significantly.

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Naveen Joshi

Tech Expert

Naveen is the Founder and CEO of Allerin, a software solutions provider that delivers innovative and agile solutions that enable to automate, inspire and impress. He is a seasoned professional with more than 20 years of experience, with extensive experience in customizing open source products for cost optimizations of large scale IT deployment. He is currently working on Internet of Things solutions with Big Data Analytics. Naveen completed his programming qualifications in various Indian institutes.

   
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