Can We Trust AI with Our Lives? It All Comes Down to This...
Imagine a world where computers can help doctors find diseases like cancer early sometimes even better than the human eye. This isn’t science fiction; it’s already real.
If you are like me, you’ve probably heard about AI revolutionizing everything from your Netflix recommendations to your self-driving car. But when it comes to a life-or-death situation, it is worth digging deeper. Does AI actually come with revolutionary materials, or is it marketing just hype with hidden risks?
AI in healthcare works by using complex algorithms and massive amounts of medical data to help healthcare workers recognize patterns, make predictions, and process natural language. Whatever it is that AI is doing, its use among many different platforms is skyrocketing. But, just like any other technology, AI also has its pros and cons.
Benefits
Improves diagnostic accuracy in imaging and predictions
Doctors and nurses are not necessarily available in every single town and village this world holds. Even if they are, not all people can afford the prices healthcare puts forward. Due to this, people in under-sourced areas just shrug off the disease that they have, thinking that it is “okay” or “normal” to have some symptoms, but in reality, they could be having deadly diseases like cancer.
This is where AI comes in to lend a helpful hand. A recent study from The Institute of Cancer Research looked into whole-body diffusion weighted MRI for advanced prostate cancer. By combining different AI models, this technology can handle tedious and time-consuming jobs like identifying body structures, examining images, and detecting lesions. You might think that the results are inaccurate, but experts said that their software gives fast, feasible solutions by generating accurate results in seconds. Because of this, what used to take hours can now be done in seconds. This development in technology also decreases the difference in how various scans are interpreted and helps doctors make better decisions overall, which usually leads to earlier interventions and more personalised care. This AI can also measure how cancer spreads and changes over time, helping doctors to focus more on patient care than image analysis.
Boosts efficiency, reduces costs in drug discovery and admin tasks
You guessed it, AI doesn't just play a massive role in helping out the doctors, it also plays a major role in making drug discovery faster and less expensive. According to a National Library of Medicine article, it does this by automating tasks that usually depend on slow trial and error methods, such as HTS (High-Throughput Screening). Scientists use robots and AI in high-throughput screening to test hundreds or thousands of molecules on infected cells at the same time. This helps them quickly identify which ones kill a virus or parasite without harming healthy cells. This technology speeds up drug discovery from years to just days and has already helped identify promising treatments for neglected diseases like leishmaniasis and Chagas.
Traditional drug development can take more than a decade and may cost a lot of money; we’re talking billions of dollars. But when AI comes into this equation, it can predict how molecules will behave in a matter of days or even hours. For example, Insilico Medicine used AI to design a potential treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in just 18 months. Without the use of AI, this project is projected to take 2.5 to 4 years or longer, maybe even a decade. AI speeds up this process by predicting properties like how well a drug will bind to a target, just like how a search engine quickly sorts through billions of webpages to find relevant results. This is very crucial as it helps researchers avoid wasting time and money on compounds that are unlikely to work and allows promising drugs to be identified much earlier.
This technology’s limits are extending far beyond that because it displays a win-win situation, as it reduces costs in healthcare administration by making processes like clinical trial recruitment and data management faster and more efficient. Instead of depending on people to physically look through every electron health record. Ai can use natural language processing to quickly identify necessary patterns in patients by analyzing large and scattered data sets.
Enables personalized care and access in underserved areas
Artificial intelligence can help make healthcare more personal and easier to access, mainly for people who have not always received equal care. For instance, in California, safety-net plans are already using AI to find patients who are at a comparatively higher risk than other patients to give them the necessary care they need in a quick way, because consuming a great deal of time may cost people their lives. Moreover, tools like machine learning help scan medical records and find possible health issues and maybe even suggest better treatment options to the healthcare providers. There are also other software applications in the market that send reminders for things like checkups or missed appointments, or even monitor pregnancy risks and predict health issues.