Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the realm for patient care, and this was definitely a hot topic at the recent MDM East’s session AI Is Moving The Needle.
One expert on the panel was Nathan Silberman, Head of Deep Learning at Butterfly Network. Silberman said AI has the capability to speed up the process of spotting urgent matters. Many times doctors are in a rush looking at a large, data-filled image, while this same image would take a computer seconds to process.
“There are many spaces for AI to step in and lend a second pair of eyes,” said Silberman.
There is infinite information that doctors and hospitals have to process and log already, yet with technological advancements hospitals are flooded with even more data. Robert Kaul, Founder and CEO of CloudDX, said clinicians do not want more data. In order to combat this overload of information there needs to be an artificial layer to help select only the data doctor’s want, Kaul said. But this overload comes with one shortage: the information is not always right.
AI can be tolerant for false positive and negatives, but fortunately it gets smarter and smarter every time. Kaul said this adaptability and investment in knowledge can prove beneficial to many clinicians.
Another advantage AI provides is its ability to determine at-risk patients and intervene with their lifestyle habits before they are diagnosed with a condition. For instance, Shameer Khadar, Program Director of Machine Learning at Norwell Health, said doctors can use AI to find who is at risk for diabetes and reach out to them before they are diagnosed. This would prevent the threshold of people with diabetes from rising in national studies.
With AI’s insights, the panel believed patient care could become highly advanced, but not without some challenges. Kaul said implementing AI is a complicated process when it comes to hitting security standards for both big and small healthcare companies.
Although the issue of security will still need attention, the panel agreed they hope there are more AI-integrated devices in the future that can provide diagnostic results for anyone to use.
