ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR GENUINE HEALTHCARE What is Artificial Intelligence? Many of us have wondered what is artificial intelligence and why is it called artificial? Well, we know what intelligence is. The ability to apply one’s knowledge and skills to do a particular task is called intelligence. We develop this by learning, reasoning, problem solving and perception. But this is associated with humans. What about machines? Can they too have intelligence? Can they too perform complex tasks without us instructing them at every step? If they had, what would we call it? Well this is where “Artificial Intelligence(AI)” term comes into picture. WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AI makes it possible for machines to learn from experience, adjust to new inputs and perform human-like tasks. A lot of technologies which we hear about today, from self-driving cars, chess playing robots to the latest we hear about, Siri are all based on AI. They rely heavily on deep learning and natural language processing. Based on these concepts, the machines can perform activities like learning, speech recognition, planning and problem solving.
But who was the mastermind behind all this? Who had this idea that we could take help of machines to make our life easier? Well if you have watched the Hollywood movie “The Imitation Game”, you must have come to know who am I talking about. Yes, Alan Turing. Turing was a leading cryptanalyst at the Government Code and Cypher School, Bletchley Park, UK. He had a major contribution during the Second World War where he developed the first modern computer
due to which he and his team was able to crack “Enigma” code which led to the Germans losing the war against Britain. AI IN HEALTHCARE The use of AI in healthcare has grown many folds and it makes us ponder whether AI doctors will replace human doctors in future. Well that is a little hard to believe however the AI is definitely assisting our doctors to make better clinical decisions or even replace human judgement in certain functional areas of healthcare.The increasing availability of healthcare data and rapid development of big data analytic methods has made possible the recent successful applications of AI in healthcare. Guided by relevant clinical questions, powerful AI techniques can unlock clinically relevant information hidden in the massive amount of data, which in turn can assist clinical decision making.
The most crucial areas where AI is used in healthcare are oncology, neurology and cardiology.The concentration around these three diseases is not completely unexpected. All three diseases are leading causes of death; therefore, early diagnoses are crucial to prevent the deterioration of patients’ health status. Furthermore, early diagnoses can be potentially achieved through improving the analysis procedures on imaging, genetic, EP or EMR, which is the strength of the AI system. AI FOR CANCER DETECTION A lot of research work has went into this field where AI will assist doctors in determining cancer in early stages so that it can be easier for the doctor to treat and for patient to recover.new research from Japanese scientists suggests AI can be used to detect colorectal cancer in its earli-
est stages, before tumors become malignant and the deadly cancer becomes much harder to treat. In fact, the tech was able to detect cancer with 86% accuracy. There are numerous such firms who are working on this technology one of them being PatientMD, which is a modern day healthcare platform which assists people in all their healthcare needs. PatientMD is in a phase of rigorous research to detect skin cancer using AI. It collects high resolution publicly available images of skin cancer for training the algorithm. The images are labelled with a set of attributes such as age, position of cell, sex of infected person etc. Once the algorithm is trained using these images, it is then tested with the help of similar such images to check for the accuracy. PatientMD intends to achieve an accuracy of at least 72% in the initial phases.
In future, PatientMD also aims to incorporate this feature in its mobile app for android and iOS wherein the user will just download our app, upload high resolution images and can hope to get immediate results of the probability of the biopsy image being benign or not. If this is successful, it will be a revolutionary step ahead in the patient healthcare industry.