Huge Untapped Potential of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare

A lot has been spoken about the potential of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to disrupt industries. AI is already seeing a wide application in industries such as finance, education, robotics, transportation, security, and to an extent in healthcare. 

Today in healthcare, ML and AI application have been seen mostly in diagnostics, research and new drug development. Popular use cases being image recognition of retinal scans to detect early signs of retinopathy and disease progression in diabetics and hypertensive patients. It also serves as an aid to recognize abnormalities in ECG tests, X-rays, ultrasound, CT and MRI scans.

Pharmaceutical industries are leveraging AI to design newer drugs for cancer care and new drug applications are seeing records highs. However, when it comes to clinical care, the application of AI is restricted to optimizing pathologists and radiologists’ time to diagnosis and accuracy of diagnosisAI is yet to see wider application when it comes to clinical decision-making in an OPD setting. What would it take to deliver the benefits of machine intelligence to a common man’s day to day health, how could we reach a stage where we can take into account the complete patient context, past history and response to treatment to personalize medical care?

We have struggled to improve our doctor to population ratio. By supercharging the healthcare system with AI we could potentially increase the ability of the doctor to treat more patients more efficiently thus leapfrogging to the healthcare of the future.