Artificial Intelligence in the Healthcare Industry
The healthcare industry is full of challenges that can be solved by innovative technologies. We have already written about how this industry can benefit from AR/VR technologies and IoT and this time we will show what opportunities AI (artificial intelligence) has to offer.
The Benefits Of Using AI in Healthcare
Artificial intelligence implies the ability of software to learn — just like people do — and to use all the received information for making decisions and performing actions. Let us see what benefits it brings to the healthcare industry.
Improved diagnostics
One of the main medical problems is misdiagnosis that steals precious time from curing real diseases and can make things worse by the wrong treatment. After being trained on thousands and millions of detailed medical records and images, AI can help to diagnose quickly and accurately reducing the number of mistakes and saving time for doctors and patients. The solution like this has already been developed by Google’s DeepMind, UCL and Moorfields Eye Hospital and it is used for identifying a wide range of eye diseases analyzing 3D scans as well as for advising an appropriate treatment scheme.
Treatment schemes
As mentioned above, well-trained AI can find the best possible treatment. It takes into account all the significant characteristics of the patient’s state (age, lifestyle, the results of medical researches, previous treatment experience), matches this information with its knowledge about the effect of different medicines and comes up with recommendations that are more likely to eliminate the health problem in a smoother and faster way.
Operational assistance
AI enhances surgical accuracy and improves the results of operations by modeling detailed schemes of the body parts or organs that are meant to undergo an intervention. Having accurate images about the location and the structure of arteries or a tumor, the surgeon can better plan the operation as well as refer to them in the process.
Available follow-ups
One more challenge AI copes with is the inability of doctors and nurses to provide patients with a proper follow-up after the operation or during the treatment. Since such a type of medical care requires communication with the practitioners and might be costly, not everyone can afford it due to the remote places of living and being on a budget. With the help of wearable devices, AI-based medical apps can monitor and analyze the patient’s condition in order to recommend medicines, activities, and examinations.
Predictive analytics
In conjunction with IoT and wearable devices, AI can also detect symptoms of up-coming attacks, strokes, exacerbations and warn the person about the danger. In the case of elderly people or those with serious diseases, the apps can warn not only the patient but also the doctors and relatives so that the required help could come as fast as possible as sometimes each second matters.
This also works for medical equipment: the technology can predict and prevent breakdowns.
Powering science and drug production
AI allows saving time and money spent on searching for treatments and other researches. It uses all the provided data (such as the results of previous researches, the way different medicines and substances work: alone and being combined with others) and analyzes it to deliver the best possible result much faster than scientists would do.
Administrative assistance
Maintaining the relevance of the health records and filling in other documents wastes too much doctors’ time and reduces their motivation. AI can help to minimize this exhausting administrative work using NLP (natural language processing). This technology listens to human speech and automatically translates it into text. So, the documents can be filled in on their own and only checked by a human later. In some time, when the technology is improved, there will be no need for additional actions at all.
Cyber security
Clinics and hospitals have to ensure the strongest security of their databases in order to guarantee the confidentiality of patients’ sensitive information. And it is another issue AI can help with. It analyzes the system and the suspicious actions of those trying to interact with the system so that all the potential risks and hazards could be predicted and eliminated.
The Bottom Line
Within the healthtech, AI becomes a life-saving and world-changing tool capable of preventing the irreparable consequences, simplifying doctors’ jobs, improving patients’ lives, saving time and money for researches and medical companies, and much more.
At SCAND, we believe that there are many more opportunities to change the industries and world with the help of AI. If you are ready to explore them, contact us to get an enthusiastic, reliable, and skilled partner.