In recent times the relatively new phenomenon of artificial intelligence has changed the landscape of the healthcare industry. This new technology has been making huge inroads globally across hospitals and healthcare units and the maximum benefits from this are being reaped by the patients and the medical personnel as the quality of healthcare has vastly improved and the ease of conducting medical operations, proper diagnosis and administering the correct treatment has become much more of a reality now than before when the chances of mistakes by doctors could seriously affect the health of their patients. But with AI this has drastically been reduced and it has even become possible to predict certain health issues and prevent diseases with the help of various analytical tools rather than incurring unwanted medical expenditure due to the patient contracting the disease as a result of not taking proper and timely preventive measures. Let us take a closer look at the concept of AI:
WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND HOW DOES IT WORK?
When computers display human-like intelligence and perform cognitive functions in the field of medical science like prediction, diagnosis of diseases and health conditions which used to be normally performed by humans is termed as ‘artificial intelligence.’ It works in the following ways:
- These AI-based applications are able to analyse the medical history and symptoms of patients and compare with a huge database of diseases which it has at its disposal and provide surprisingly accurate predictions which were not possible before.
- Two hospitals in Essex which use this technology have claimed that AI provides better results than humans. According to them, the accuracy percentage of AI is 91 percent which is about 17 percent better than a nurse and 14 percent better than a family physician.
- The speciality of these systems and applications lies in the fact that they are easily able to locate patterns within databases which are impossible for the human brain to understand due to their huge size and complex nature.
- It enables the doctors to keep track on records of their patients, thus it's tremendously useful in the crucial and all-important task of medical decision-making which determines both the fate of the patient and the success rate as well as the career of their doctor.
- With the help of AI, the mammograms can be performed 30 times faster with a vastly improved accuracy percentage of 99% thereby eliminating the need for unwanted medical procedures like biopsies and reducing the chance of a wrong diagnosis and the tension that it causes among the patients.
AI- The Future of the Healthcare Industry:
With the advent of the technology of artificial intelligence, a new era has indeed dawned on the healthcare industry which will enable it to scale newer heights. Some of the benefits of AI which prove that it is indeed the way forward for hospitals and the healthcare sector are discussed below:
- A supercomputer which goes by the name IBM Watson is capable of answering the questions posed to it, in mere 10 minutes by analysing 20 million research papers. it is being used at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York to diagnose a rare form of leukaemia. This machine has easily beaten human experts and was able to correctly diagnose the disease which had perplexed doctors and oncologists for several months as they were unable to diagnose it properly. Now it is used in about 21 hospitals in China, Thailand and India.
- Babylon has recently entered into a partnership with 2 hospitals based in Essex and 21,500 patients have been made eligible to try their app. About 10 % of the registered patients had tried out the app, since then it has drastically reduced the waiting time in both the hospitals.
- Path way Genomics will provide personalised health advice to each user by analysing their genetic structure and makeup.
- Atomwise has used AI technology to produced valuable drug in a day, which could treat Pancreatic cancer and Ebola. Thus, AI has potentially reduced the time and costs associated with promoting new drugs and medicines. According to an estimate, it usually takes roughly 12 years for a new drug to reach the patient from the research lab. The latest advancements in AI to modernise the drug researching process can go a long way in curbing these costs and time.
CONCLUSION
Artificial Intelligence will definitely take over every aspect of medical or healthcare industry in the near future. The market for healthcare robotics is expected to reach an astounding $11.4 billion by 2020. Already a survey of 11,000 people spanning 12 countries has revealed that more than half (about 55%) of the patients are willing to give robotics based AI technology a try and about 73% of the respondents agreed to let a robot perform a minor surgical operation on them instead of a doctor. This explosion of AI technology in the field of healthcare has proved beyond an iota of doubt that it is here to stay and is indeed the future of the healthcare industry. In fact, that day may not be far when doctors and healthcare professionals could rely completely on AI-enabled robots to perform their tasks and the whole healthcare sector could become AI-oriented. Thus, this new era of AI in hospitals and healthcare signals the unprecedented rise of technology in the field of medicine and health care which is going to take it to hitherto unexplored and unreachable horizons.
