The Future of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
Artificial intelligence in healthcare is an overarching term used to describe the use of machine-learning algorithms and software, or artificial intelligence (AI), to mimic human cognition in the analysis, presentation, and comprehension of complex medical and health care data. Specifically, AI is the ability of computer algorithms to approximate conclusions based solely on input data.
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Primary care
Primary care has become one key development area for AI technologies. AI in primary care has been used for supporting decision making, predictive modelling, and business analytics. Despite the rapid advances in AI technologies, general practitioners' view on the role of AI in primary care is very limited–mainly focused on administrative and routine documentation tasks.
Disease diagnosis
Through the use of Medical Learning Classifiers (MLC’s), Artificial Intelligence has been able to substantially aid doctors in patient diagnosis through the manipulation of mass Electronic Health Records (EHR’s). Medical conditions have grown more complex, and with a vast history of electronic medical records building, the likelihood of case duplication is high.
Although someone today with a rare illness is less likely to be the only person to have suffered from any given disease, the inability to access cases from similarly symptomatic origins is a major roadblock for physicians. The implementation of AI to not only help find similar cases and treatments, but also factor in chief symptoms and help the physicians ask the most appropriate questions helps the patient receive the most accurate diagnosis and treatment possible.
Telemedicine
The increase of telemedicine, the treatment of patients remotely, has shown the rise of possible AI applications. AI can assist in caring for patients remotely by monitoring their information through sensors. A wearable device may allow for constant monitoring of a patient and the ability to notice changes that may be less distinguishable by humans. The information can be compared to other data that has already been collected using artificial intelligence algorithms that alert physicians if there are any issues to be aware of.
Electronic health records
Electronic health records (EHR) are crucial to the digitalization and information spread of the healthcare industry. Now that around 80% of medical practices use EHR, the next step is to use artificial intelligence to interpret the records and provide new information to physicians. One application uses natural language processing (NLP) to make more succinct reports that limit the variation between medical terms by matching similar medical terms.
For example, the term heart attack and myocardial infarction mean the same things, but physicians may use one over the over based on personal preferences. NLP algorithms consolidate these differences so that larger datasets can be analyzed. Another use of NLP identifies phrases that are redundant due to repetition in a physician’s notes and keeps the relevant information to make it easier to read.