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EIGHT MEDICAL FIELDS WHICH AI WILL REVOLUTIONIZE

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EIGHT MEDICAL FIELDS WHICH AI WILL REVOLUTIONIZE

Admin / January 24, 2023

The potential which artificial intelligence has in healthcare is quite impressive, it’s expected that within the next few years, AI will revolutionize almost every field in our lives; especially medicine.

One of the reasons AI has such incredible abilities, is its digital capacity, it can store amounts that the human brain simply can’t, which means the more data saved and available to use, the more AI can change the course of healthcare as we know it. Digital data amounts are doubling every couple of years; it had 4.4 zettabytes in 2013, but in 2020 it reaches 44 zettabytes, which means 44 trillion gigabytes. These amounts of data can be stored in computers, therefore allowing AI to become the best tool for the job; to maintain, extract and alter medical data. Doctors will be able to get all the information they need just with a click on the computer, whether to set a course of treatment or learn about genetics. Let’s take a look at eight ways AI can revolutionise the medical fields.

1. Logistics

AI can better organize all medical data, from patient treatment plans to patient routes and medical history. Everything will be given to doctors within a matter of seconds to allow them make their decision. Implementing AI assistant to the healthcare systems could lead patients and optimize their time through their journey, as it can direct them to know where are the shorter queues, which tests to do and where. AI can also connect them with NEMT or non emergency medical transportation; these are ride hailing applications like Uber, but the algorithm can give the patient which facility is more efficient, according to their medical needs as well as the distance. This way, each patient will have saved time and is directed to the right place, as opposed to seeing a general practitioner and then guided to a different facility, or seeing a doctor then redirected to do a test, this way they can know what tests to do before seeing their doctor, it saves time for both.

2. Data management

When we think of AI, we think about organising; mining and storing patient data is an on obvious way that AI is efficiently used. AI can collect, store, normalise and trace data, which is the first step in revolutionizing the healthcare system. These tasks are bureaucratic as they are mundane, however are very crucial to both doctors and patients. Even though these tasks aren’t related to practicing medicine, medical personnel are still obliged to do them. By implementing algorithms that can automate these administrative tasks will definitely free much of a doctor’s valuable time, as this time can be dedicated to other medical related tasks.

3. Diagnosis

AI can be used in diagnosis and plans for treatment. Many studies have now concluded that radiologists were able to enhance their detection of cancer with the help of AI. They were able to detect the disease early on from radiological scans. This is believed to develop drastically in the future, to the point that trained AI algorithms can discover the right course of treatment, as well as cures when human medical personnel are stumped. This can be applicable through the combination of attributes from files of patients, along with clinical experience and external researches and data, AI can identify potential course of treatments for patients.

4. Repetitive tasks

AI can save a huge amount of both time and effort for a doctor, a nurse or any medical personnel by assisting with these repetitive tasks. They must complete these tasks every single day, which takes hours. A study in the United States, shows that 8.7 hours per week are spent by doctors on administration work only. These mundane repetitive tasks can be automated by AI-based solutions. These solutions will take a load off the medical staff, as they can spend this time doing something medical related, as opposed to administrative work and charting.

5. Online consultation

There’s a patient remote consulting service based in the United Kingdom which offers consultation to patients when they input their symptoms. It is based on medical history and medical knowledge that is common. The application takes the input symptoms and runs them through a database of most common diseases using speech recognition. The application also considers the history of the patient as well as their circumstances. After that, the application gives a suggested course of action. This service gained quite a momentum since the Covid-19 pandemic started and is expected to grow much wider in the future.

6. Precision medicine

Genetics and genomics will be significantly changed by AI. Deep Genomics has an important aim, which is to be able to identify patterns in massive data sets that consists of genetic information and history of medical records, as it looks for both genetic mutations and their links to diseases. These new inventions will be a whole new generation of technology, in which a computer can detect and inform doctors what changes in a cell when the DNA is altered by genetic variations. It can identify changes in both scenarios, whether the change was due to natural or therapeutic. As AI is only tool that has this capability to hold such huge amount of data and gives insights, allowing doctors to create personalized solutions and treatment, and in the future, the machine will be able to do so on its own.

7. Creation of Drugs

Creating a new drugs takes more than ten years and costs billions. As all new pharmaceuticals go through clinical trials. With medicine, time is always not on our side, as sometimes by the time we are able to get a new drug, the disease has mutated or changed, like the Corona virus. Therefore, using AI is the best solution, as it will speed up this procedure drastically and will also cut the costs to become much less. Back in 2015, during Ebola epidemic, one company used its AI algorithms to identify two drugs with potential to reduce Ebola infections. This was done in less than a day! Imagine how much time this normally would take?! Al algorithms should be our new go-to when developing new drugs or cures.

8. Analysis of healthcare systems

Currently in the Netherlands, 97 percent of their healthcare invoices stored digitally. These invoices have information about the patient, the doctor, the hospital and of course the treatment. These records being of a digital nature, makes them incredibly easy to be retrieved from any facility. A local company in the Netherlands uses mining data as to be able to determine if a clinic, hospital or doctor repeats a certain mistake when treating certain cases or diseases, this way they can detect the mistake and enhance their systems by avoiding the repetition of their mistakes and their overall systems.

Artificial intelligence can be applied and improved in all these functions and much more, with time, it certainly will take over.