Artificial Intelligence and Modern Medicine
Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming part of modern medical healthcare, AI and other AI powered tools and applications are being used to support medical professionals in clinical settings and in ongoing research, It is commonly used in clinical decision support and imaging analysis. Clinical decision tools help doctors and medical professional make decisions about treatments, medications, mental health and other patient needs by providing them with quick access to information or research that's relevant to their patient. AI assisted medical imaging tools are being used to analyze CT scans, x-rays, MRIs and other images for lesions or other findings that a human radiologist might miss. The COVID-19 pandemic brought new challenges to many health systems and healthcare organizations around the world AI technologies help monitor patients and to screen COVID-19 patients. AI brought opportunities to benefit clinicians, researchers and patients they serve. At this point, there is little doubt that AI will become a core part of the digital health systems that shape and support modern medicine.
There are numerous ways AI can positively impact the practice of medicine, whether speeding up research or help medical professionals make better decisions. Here are some of the AI applications in medicine;
Disease Detection and Diagnosis
Machine learning tools can be used to help observe the vital signs of patients receiving critical care and alert clinicians if certain risk factors increase, unlike human, machines don't sleep so 24 hours observation, analysis and can collect data from those devices and look for more complex conditions. A AI developer has developed a predictive AI model for premature babies that is 75% accurate in detecting severe sepsis.
Personalized Treatment
AI-powered virtual assistants can enhance precision medicine by offering patients customized, real-time recommendations based on their medical history, preferences, and needs, providing around-the-clock support without the need to repeat information to different people.
Medical Imaging
AI is increasingly prominent in medical imaging, with research showing it can match human radiologists in detecting breast cancer and other conditions. Beyond aiding early disease detection, AI streamlines the management of medical images by identifying key patient history and presenting relevant images to medical professionals. There's even a new AI tool that provides multiple plausible segmentations that each highlight slightly different areas of a medical image and produce outputs and select the most appropriate one for their purpose as a medical professional may specify. It even perform faster than other AI imaging tool.
Clinical Trial Efficiency
A lot of time is spent during clinical trials assigning medical codes to patient outcomes and updating the relevant datasets. AI can help speed this process up by providing a quicker and more intelligent search for medical codes. Two IBM Watson Health clients recently found that with AI, they could reduce their number of medical code searches by more than 70%.
Accelerated Drug Development
Producing drug for treatment is not easy it is one of the longest and most costly parts of drug development. AI can help reduce the costs and time of developing new medicines in primarily two ways: creating better drug designs and finding promising new drug combinations. With AI, many of the big data challenges facing the life sciences industry could be overcome.
Benefits of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine
Informed Patient Care
Integrating medical AI into clinician workflows provides real-time, evidence-based insights on treatments, reducing research time and aiding care decisions while the patient is the room with the doctor.
Error Reduction
Recent studies show that AI can enhance patient safety by improving error detection and drug management through decision support tools. Just like the case of the mother who went to see 17 doctors to know what wrong with her son, in her frustration she shared all her sons symptoms and all the information she could gather from his MRIs to ChatGPT and it suggested a diagnosis which turned out to be correct after doctors look at it again using chatgpt's suggested diagnosis.
Reducing the Costs of Care
AI offers various cost-saving opportunities in healthcare, such as reducing medication errors, providing customized virtual health assistance, preventing fraud, and streamlining administrative and clinical workflows.
Increasing Doctor-Patient Engagement
AI-powered chatbots can offer patients 24/7 support by answering basic questions and providing resources outside regular office hours. Additionally, AI can triage questions, flag important information for further review, and alert providers to health changes requiring attention.
Providing Contextual Relevance
Deep learning AI algorithms can distinguish between different types of information using context, such as identifying new medications recommended by a provider within a patient's medical history in clinical notes.
Robot-Assisted Surgery
AI robotics in surgery reduce human error, minimize invasiveness, provide 3D views, address issues like hand tremors and fatigue that are inherent to humans, ensure consistent performance, collect real-time data, and offer feedback. This results in safer surgeries, faster recovery, and better patient outcomes.
As AI becomes more integrated into people’s everyday lives, it won't be long when AI will help in prolonging peoples lives too. Advances in medical technology driven by advances in artificial intelligence is hastening this process. Time will come when a real AI robot will do or perform medical operations on humans with doctors just feeding the right procedure and medication to the robot.
Sources
https://www.ibm.com/topics/artificial-intelligence-medicine
https://news.mit.edu/2024/new-ai-method-captures-uncertainty-medical-images-0411
https://www.today.com/health/mom-chatgpt-diagnosis-pain-rcna101843
https://smarttek.solutions/blog/ai-in-healthcare/
Images:
metamorworks
https://smarttek.solutions/
https://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/
