Thursday, April 11, 2019

A Doctor’s Prescription for More AI in Medicine

A Doctor’s Prescription for More AI in Medicine
Eric Topol makes the case for how artificial intelligence can improve health care, despite privacy concerns


Artificial intelligence (AI) is allowing many new opportunities. It is also transforming the healthcare field. Some are skeptical about AI though. Some critics believe that it dehumanizes medicine and removes doctor-patient relationships.

Dr. Eric Topol, who is a cardiologist and director/founder of Scripps Research Translational Institute in San Diego, argues against these critics. He believes that AI can improve the accuracy of diagnosis as well as the treatment of illnesses. Furthermore, he believes that AI can restore compassion in medicine to make healthcare medicine human again.

Dr. Topol was recently interviewed. He was asked many questions, including what specialties and tasks AI is particularly useful for. He replied, “It’s perfect for anything that’s a pattern, be it an image, like a medical scan, or speech. For both those areas of image and speech, we now have deep learning algorithms that are as good as humans, even expert humans, in interpreting and making the right classification. So that’s the strength and that’s where we can immediately in the years ahead start to harness that to improve health care.” Dr. Topol also mentioned that it would allow doctors to have more free time because AI is able to receive a large amount of data and diffuse it for the doctors to process.

I chose this article because this could be one of the most important advances in the history of healthcare. AI is in many applications that we use today, we probably just do not think about it. There is Netflix, Amazon, Alexa, Google Home, Apple music, and much more! This topic relates to marketing concepts because these different companies can promote their product by saying how life could be made easier and simpler due to AI. AI also makes things more entertaining and fun for people. Hospitals who decide to use AI can promote and advertise it. Furthermore, they can inform their patients that they will be greatly taken care of because AI will accurately diagnose them and treat them thoroughly. They can also inform patients that there has been a study about how AI was able to diagnose a case more accurately than human doctors when given the same amount of time to solve the case. These hospitals can target those patients who have rare diseases or cases that human doctors have not been able to accurately diagnose or find a cure for.

By Sumathi Reddy
March 4, 2019 9:39 a.m. ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-doctors-prescription-for-more-a-i-in-medicine-11551710359

2 comments:

  1. This is where medicine was always headed. I don't think AI will take away from Doctor Patient relations. instead, it will allow the doctors to focus more on their patients over all instead of just dealing with the one problem they are trying to figure out because the AI will be taking a lot of the work out.

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  2. AI is already being utilized at some places, such as predicting patient disease onset, reducing wait times, automating insurance claims and identifying diagnoses from images and reports.
    http://todayssimpleaiformarketing.com/

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