AI has the potential to be applied in almost in every field of medicine – medical diagnosis, patient monitoring , personalised treatment & drug development .
- Right from capturing patients biometrics /Iris scans for privacy & security of his data , its storage on cloud , its retrieval infraction of a second with hundred percentage accuracy from heaps of data of billions of patients is not humanly possible , only Technology can do this task in fraction of seconds .
- Directing patient to the desk with less crowd through Queue & turn directing soft ware to reduce patient time & increase patient turn over could not be done manually .
- AI with speech recognition capability records data EHR (Electronic health record)of the patient’s symptoms & history , and is able to identify patterns on this data to form a potential diagnosis , prevent disease or recommend an appropriate course of action such as medical investigations that may be required to confirm the diagnosis .
- Language translation of speech & text into any or several global languages instantly is a gigantic task humanly impossible .
- Provisional diagnosis of an ECG or an Xray is a technological marvel
- Pathology eg which is concerned with the diagnosis of the diseases based on lab analysis of bodily fluids and tissues etc shall benefit immensely from AI, helping diagnose more accurately by cross referencing with huge amount of data available .
- Oncology : In 2016, a Japanese patient with confusing condition was successfully diagnosed as suffering from rare leukaemia with the help of IBMs Watson Computer , which did it by cross referencing 20 million oncology records.
- AI can spot signs of disease more quickly & accurately in medical images like , MRIs, CT scans, Xrays & ultrasounds . Hence helps in faster and accurate identification of diseases .
- Diagnosing diseases correctly takes years of medical learning , training & experience . Even then the diagnostics are often an arduous time consuming process .Many times , the demand for experts far exceeds the available supply . This puts doctors under strain & often delays life saving patient diagnostics . As per WHO approx 400 million people have no access to even the most basic health care .
- AI has the potential to change this . It can make diagnostics not only more accurate & accessible but also cheaper.
- Eliminates Human Error due to stress & fatigue : humans are prone to fatigue , mood swingings etc which can cause risk of making errors . One of the recent study shows that diagnostic error contrtibutes to approx 10% patient deaths . The financial cost of human medical error is 19.5 billion USD but AI does not suffer from fatigue, distraction or moods .
- Decrease in medical cost : AI has ability to access & process huge amount of data at incredible speed and out perform humans in accuracy . It can organise the human Medical data in an organised matter , so that physcician can view it with in fraction of time it used in the conventional method .Hence the potential to improve the out comes, increased out put & productivity thus reduce the cost of treatment .
- Increases doctor- patient interaction: Doctors spend a lot of time on data entry , rather then patient examination . With the help of AI paper work will get automated , giving the physician more time to see the patient .
- Keeping abreast with huge amount of data : Human race has huge amount of medical knowledge . It is humanly impossible to analyse & draw conclusion from a mountain load of data – clinical or genomic & find the best treatment for every patient . But AI makes it possible .
- AI complimenting human intuition with precision is the biggest revolution in the medical diagnosis . AI can have more medical knowledge than any one human brain can accumulate and out-perform any doctor .
Dr Meena Aggarwal
Sevatidevi Memorial Digital Medical Centers Pvt Ltd
Follow Us
