How is AI transforming the healthcare Industry
AI Assisted Robotic Surgery - Robots can analyze data from pre-operation medical records to guide a surgeon's instrument during surgery. AI-assisted robotic procedure resulted in five times fewer complications compared to surgeons operating alone. The most advanced surgical robot, the ‘Da Vinci’ allows doctors to perform complex procedures with greater control than conventional approaches.
Virtual Nursing Assistance - When AI solutions remotely assess a patient’s symptoms and deliver alerts to clinicians only when patient care is needed, it reduces unnecessary hospital visits. It can also lessen the burden on medical professionals. E.g., the Arthritis Virtual Assistant developed by IBM for Arthritis Research UK is learning to provide personalized information and advice concerning medicines, diet and exercise through interactions with patients.
Timesaving administrative workflow assistant capabilities— such as voice-to-text transcription eliminate non-patient care activities including writing chart notes, prescriptions and ordering tests.
Image Analysis - IDx LLC software analyses images of the eye taken by a camera and tells the doctor accurately about the extent of the disease, called diabetic retinopathy.
Diagnosis - IBM’s Watson for Health is helping healthcare organizations apply cognitive technology to unlock vast amounts of health data and power diagnosis. Google’s DeepMind Health is working in partnership with clinicians, researchers and patients to solve real-world healthcare problems. A Stanford University study tested an AI algorithm to detect skin cancers against dermatologists, and it performed at the level of the humans.
Physician selection in clinical trials – Healthcare research company IQVIA built a decision-support system using machine learning to help sponsors manage physician selection in clinical trials – a task fundamental to trial success.
Pharmacovigilance – IQVIA is trying to apply machine learning with natural language processing to transform many pharmacovigilance functions for greater accuracy and speed.
AI is being used in planning and resource allocation in healthcare services. For e.g., the IBM Watson Care Manager system matches individuals with a care provider that meets their needs, within their allocated care budget. It also designs individual care plans, and claims to offer insights for more effective use of care management resources.