The robots are coming to a hospital near you! Actually, they are probably already there and have been so for a while, without you knowing. As a matter of fact, health care is a perfect fit for artificial intelligence in a number of ways that I’ll describe below. There are other industries that have been using it for some time now, including the Internet, manufacturing, financing and banking, the automobile industry and the smart mobile device market. Artificial intelligence seems to be everywhere, especially where there are excessively mundane tasks that have to be performed by humans who get tired of them.
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence, or AI for short, is a field of science that studies and develops all types of intelligent machines. It encompasses any code or algorithm that is designed to imitate human intelligence or behavior. Some common examples are self-driving cars, aerial surveillance drones, GPS and Apple’s Siri. It also includes applications that predict weather patterns, monitoring and trading of stocks, and Google Search.
AI involves “machine learning” and “deep learning”. Machine Learning is a subdomain of AI that involves techniques and processes which assists machines in becoming smarter and able to develop their own logic. Deep learning, on the other hand, is a very specific kind of machine learning that uses artificial neural networks, which are meant to mimic the biological structure of the human brain. Terrified yet?
How is AI Used in Health Care?
Many experts agree that artificial intelligence will bring a complete paradigm shift to almost every aspect of health care as we know it. While some people fear that AI will one day replace human physicians and nurses, it is not meant to. Rather, the goal of AI is to help medical professionals catch problems long before they arise. AI helps doctors see things that cannot be seen by the human eye or other technology. It is meant to be used and guided by the doctor, not replace him or her.
AI can help lots of other healthcare professionals, too, including radiologists, surgeons, psychiatrists, anesthesiologists, pharmacists, dermatologists, dentists, and ophthalmologists. Health care and medicine seem to be unlimited spaces that AI can fill with new and fascinating improvements. AI can teach doctors, help with decision-making, testing, diagnostics, and care management. Massive amounts of medical information from research journals, medical textbooks, and information extracted from huge patient databases from around the globe can be managed so that physicians can find answers to problems more rapidly. Simply stated, AI is just better at handling some things in health care and medicine than people are.
AI can also help patients with various self-help tools (e.g. interactive wearable devices) improve physical and mental health. AI can assist with improving public health by detecting health risks and providing effective interventions to deal with them. It can help people in remote rural areas where there aren’t a lot of options for care through the use of telemedicine. Intelligent machines can remind patients when they need to take their medications and appointments.
AI has been shown to be effective in diagnosing many diseases and disorders, sometimes better than human physicians. The speed of diagnosis is improved greatly by AI. Surgical robots can increase efficiency and effectiveness of complicated surgeries. It can interpret images faster and more precisely than humans. AI acts as a specialist in remote areas of the country and the world, that are lacking much needed doctors specializing in various areas of medicine like oncology or radiology.
Bottom Line on Artificial Intelligence in Health Care
Artificial intelligence or AI has been around for quite a while, and without many people knowing about it. In fact, the brilliant British mathematician, Alan Turing, wrote about artificial intelligence as far back as 1950 in a journal called Mind. The title of the article, “Can a Machine Think?” set off a wave of work in AI for decades to come and some regard him as the “Father of AI”. Whether in hospitals, the car industry or Google searches, artificial intelligence is here to stay and will only become more sophisticated and widespread in almost every facet of human life.