AI in Healthcare

Some people think of AI as something which can help the world become a better place and others think of it as a threat to human civilization. This debate can last for an infinite amount of time as there are both factors present but there is no doubt that AI is useful in multiple ways. One of the sectors where AI can be very useful is "Healthcare". Let's talk about how AI is revolutionizing the Medical Industry.

What is AI?

AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. AI is a branch of computer science and its goal is to create systems that can function intelligently and independently. For example, making machines able to listen to words and interpret them, visually identifying data, etc. In simple words, making a machine think and work like or even more than humans comes under Artificial Intelligence. Whenever humans do something consciously or subconsciously, it automatically triggers the creation of neural connections similarly we can provide some datasets to computers, and using those it can recognize the pattern and even define more patterns and add to the dataset.

AI in healthcare

There are two major reasons which have made AI so impactful in the field of healthcare.

1. High availability of Medical data: As we know AI requires datasets to become intelligent. All of us have a medical history and its data is present in the form of written records in hospitals. Now there is plenty of data available for AI which makes it more impactful.

2. Development of complex Algorithms: Initially it was hard to process very complex data like medical records using machine learning but it became easier after the introduction of deep learning and neural networks because deep learning and neural networks focus on solving complex or high dimensional data. This also made AI more useful in healthcare.

Use cases of AI in healthcare

1. AI can be used to collect and reformat the data of patients and provide important insights, this can help doctors in diagnosing the patient. Because of this, Doctors are less likely to miss important factors related to patients and it will cause lesser mistakes in treatment.

For example, if a doctor suggests a patient, lose the body fat and do regular workout and the patient doesn’t tell the doctor that he has a meniscus tear or slip disc. In this case, if the patient tries to do any heavy activity for the legs during the workout session, it can cause serious injury. But if AI is being used then it can automatically suggest that patient has a meniscus tear and should avoid all heavy exercises instead change in diet and low-intensity cardio is suggested.

2. AI can suggest patients, visit the doctor if it finds some repeating pattern of some symptoms. For example, if a person had neck pain and headache during the winter season and the doctor told him that he has cervical and gave him some medicine which treated the pain but in next winter AI automatically suggested he visits the doctor as he might face the same symptoms again as it is very common to feel the pain in winters for people with cervical according to the medical records.

3. AI can analyze complex reports like MRI which can take hours for a researcher to analyze and provide the outcome.

4. AI is really helpful in detecting medical conditions such as heart attacks. AI wearables are being developed which collects data such as heart rate, sleep cycle, breathing rate, activity level, blood pressure and shows the warnings whenever it sees something unusual or unlikely.

Conclusion

The use cases we discussed above are just a glimpse of how Artificial Intelligence can revolutionize the healthcare industry. AI is more than this. Now some people might argue with me that if AI can predict wrong information, it can lead patients to some serious issues. But in my view, it is true but the more data AI gets, the smarter it becomes which means fewer mistakes. So it is a system that will take time to build before completely relying on it but we have to keep using it, improving it, and feeding it more and more data.