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Artificial Intelligence in Health
Artificial Intelligence has influenced most of the sectors in the world like health, agriculture, sports and so much more. In the last decade, one of the most influenced sector is healthcare. In the beginning, AI was considered only a technology to help in the medical decision-making. Little were we aware that it will bring a tremendous transition in the healthcare industry. From simple decision-making, it advanced to autonomous surgical robots, image diagnosis, virtual nursing assistants etc. Most of the websites/apps are now offering symptom checkers which enable the patients to reduce the number of hospital visits drastically.
AI in Cancer Prognosis and Diagnosis
Chronic health conditions like cancer, diabetics, heart diseases etc. are mostly benefited from artificial intelligence as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Chronic health conditions that benefit most from AI/ML1
Cancer is an aggressive disease with high mortality rate. But if the disease is diagnosed in early stages some of the cancers like lung cancer, breast cancer, thyroid cancer etc can be cured or controlled. A decade ago, doctors spent hours just for diagnosing cancer but still lacked accuracy. Now with the introduction of AI, the time for diagnosis has reduced considerably with much more precision.
AI model can be trained with vast amount of image data from tests like Ultrasound scanning, sonography, Endoscopy etc. Integrative processing and extraction of these images will result in more efficient diagnosis. A set of computer algorithms used to process medical images and extract details are refered to as DL. It can be used to inform doctors on prognosis, molecular status or treatment sensitivity.
Integration of AI technology in cancer care has increased the survival rate of patients. Research is being conducted on introducing AI to provide a customized care to people according to their genes and history.