Healthcare has been one of the most promising testing grounds for artificial intelligence, thanks largely to the vast amounts of data, in the forms of medical records and scans, that these smart systems can analyse. But while there are plenty of AI projects underway, there are still barriers to rolling out the benefits further.
Moorfields Eye Hospital in London has been working with Deep Mind and Google Health to develop an algorithm that interprets scans of the back of the eye, which are known as optical coherence tomography scans.
The impact of this AI-led innovation is potentially revolutionary, says Peter Thomas, director of digital innovation at Moorfields Eye Hospital. The algorithm supports automated interpretation of patient scans and gives hospital staff access to excellent diagnostic information.
SEE: Managing AI and ML in the enterprise: Tech leaders increase project development and implementation (TechRepublic Premium)
Yet despite all this promise, the impact of AI isn't as wide as it could be, at least not yet.
If you deploy AI in a hospital, you're using the technology in a place where you already have a department full of clinical experts. Yes, they'll be able to use the interpretation the AI produces, but they'd probably have come up with a similar diagnostic decision themselves.
Thomas, who spoke atthe recent virtual HETT Reset event, says that AI will have a bigger impact when you can apply it to a situation where the level of expertise is different, like in the optometry practice on your high street.
However, that's a big challenge because, at present, the technical infrastructures to support the use of those algorithms in opticians do not exist.
Infrastructure issues aren't the only barrier to the development of more effective healthcare treatment through AI. Another key challenge is finding ways to bring together data from multiple clinical sources.
Right now, AI is usually applied to single decisions. Thomas gives the example of diabetic retinopathy screening in his own hospital, where every patient with diabetes gets an annual eye scan that determines the level of follow-up care. "We know that AI can deal with that single workflow pretty well," says Thomas.
Things get more complicated when hospital staff and their AI-based assistants need to go beyond a single source of data. That's a big issue, as effective healthcare for most patients relies on more than a single data source and usually involves a complex range of information.
If we fast-forward a few more years, says Thomas, and we anticipate a point at which there are multiple autonomous decision-making systems that might be involved in a single patient's healthcare journey, then there's going to be a lot of complexity around how staff are going to implement that information in hospitals and how they're going to monitor that data effectively.
"Each algorithm will need to be monitored for bias and performance as it changes. And there's the potential for complex interaction patterns when you have multiple algorithms involved in a single patient's care," says Thomas, who says the result is clear: the impact of AI in healthcare could be revolutionary, but we're not there yet.
"We're still a distance from being at a point where we can start deploying automated clinical management that goes beyond a single decision or a single interpretation. There's a lot of work to do in terms of getting the right workforce, expertise and structures within the hospital to support that."
Other experts agree. James Teo, clinical director of AI and data science, and consultant neurologist at Guys and St Thomas NHS Foundation Trust, joined Thomas at the HETT event and says one of the things his team has discovered through its research work is that "big data is really, really big".
Automated analysis by AI not only feeds the big-data beast but also sends it off in a new direction.
As people become more aware of automation, their expectations are raised. That hope creates more demand for AI systems, which might be implemented before the key use case around improving patient outcomes is actually identified.
"One fear I have is that the process of operating AI and data-driven technologies is that we'll create an even greater hunger for data, and we'll end up spending all our time clicking on menus and checkboxes. And that, I think, is the wrong way to travel. I think we need systems that allow us to capture data in a more human-friendly way," says Teo.
Moorfields' Thomas agrees, suggesting the main accelerator for AI in healthcare must be clinical usefulness. He says there's a tendency for healthcare providers to create AI-based point solutions. Startup companies target particular healthcare problems, but those aren't necessarily the key issues patients face and, as result, the tech fails to create benefits.
Teo says the result of this badly though-through deployment process is too many point solutions that need to be managed and maintained and that's unfeasible for healthcare organisations, especially when you add-in the risk that the startups that create these point solutions might disappear with their products a few years from now.
The answer, suggests Teo, is to create common platforms, or at least common standards, for handling these point solutions. Vendors need to sign up to these standards and the aim for hospital administrators and tech suppliers alike must be to avoid reinventing the wheel.
Indra Joshi, AI director at digital transformation unit NHSX, says her organisation has plans in this direction. It set up the NHS AI Lab in 2019, a 250m programme that aims to accelerate the safe and ethical development and deployment of AI into the health and care system.
SEE: Quantum computing: Strings of ultracold atoms reveal the surprising behavior of quantum particles
One of the Lab's key programmes of work is about creating projects that take a problem-focused approach to the healthcare challenges that organisations face, rather than simply focusing on the AI products that currently exist.
"We've flipped the traditional approach on its head. We ask, 'what problems are you facing and how can we take some of those problems and develop a solution?' And if we fail, that's OK, because AI might not be the solution to every problem," says Joshi.
TheAI Lab recently worked with Kettering General Hospitalto develop a process-automation tool to help staff produce complex situational reports that have to be filled out during the coronavirus pandemic. The system automatically reduces complexity, collecting information from a variety of sources, such as frontline capacity records and patient data, and frees up staff to focus on patient care rather than reporting.
This kind of data-enabled automation goes to show how the technology can boost staff productivity and patient healthcare. While AI can have a huge impact on diagnostics and decision-making processes, the biggest impact for now is likely to be around operational processes and that's something to celebrate, too.
"People often get excited about the clinical aspects of what AI can do people always love to talk about how AI can really help in diagnosis. But actually, there's a quite a lot of great work happening in the back-end processes," says Joshi.
Link:
AI will have a huge impact on your healthcare. But there are still big obstacles to overcome - ZDNet
- Classic reasoning systems like Loom and PowerLoom vs. more modern systems based on probalistic networks - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using Amazon's cloud service for computationally expensive calculations - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software environments for working on AI projects - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of my NLP toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Semantic Web: through the back door with HTML and CSS - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Java FastTag part of speech tagger is now released under the LGPL - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Defining AI and Knowledge Engineering - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Great Overview of Knowledge Representation - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Something like Google page rank for semantic web URIs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My experiences writing AI software for vehicle control in games and virtual reality systems - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The URL for this blog has changed - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- I have a new page on Knowledge Management - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- N-GRAM analysis using Ruby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Good video: Knowledge Representation and the Semantic Web - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using the PowerLoom reasoning system with JRuby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Machines Like Us - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- RapidMiner machine learning, data mining, and visualization tool - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- texai.org - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- NLTK: The Natural Language Toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My OpenCalais Ruby client library - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Ruby API for accessing Freebase/Metaweb structured data - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Protégé OWL Ontology Editor - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of Numenta software is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Very nice: Elsevier IJCAI AI Journal articles now available for free as PDFs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Verison 2.0 of OpenCyc is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What’s Your Biggest Question about Artificial Intelligence? [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Minimax Search [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Tree [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- More AI Content & Format Preference Poll [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New Planners Solve Rescue Missions [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Learns to Bluff at Poker [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Pushing the Limits of Game AI Technology [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Mining Data for the Netflix Prize [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Interview with Peter Denning on the Principles of Computing [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Making for Medical Support [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Creates Music CD [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- jKilavuz - a guide in the polygon soup [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial General Intelligence: Now Is the Time [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Apply AI 2007 Roundtable Report [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What Would You do With 80 Cores? [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software Finds Learning Language Child's Play [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence in Games [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence Resources - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Alan Turing: Mathematical Biologist? - April 25th, 2012 [April 25th, 2012]
- BBC Horizon: The Hunt for AI ( Artificial Intelligence ) - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Can computers have true artificial intelligence" Masonic handshake" 3rd-April-2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Kevin B. Korb - Interview - Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity p3 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence - 6 Month Anniversary - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Science Breakthroughs - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Hitman: Blood Money - Part 49 - Stupid Artificial Intelligence! - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Research Members Turned Off By HAARP Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence Lecture No. 5 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Charlie Rose - Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Expert on artificial intelligence to speak at EPIIC Nights dinner - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Filipino software engineers complete and best thousands on Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Course - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Vodafone xone™ Hackathon Challenges Developers and Entrepreneurs to Build a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence ... - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Packages Up CPG Booster - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- 2 Filipinos finishes among top in Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence course - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- Why Your Brain Isn't A Computer - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- 2 Pinoy software engineers complete Stanford's AI course - May 7th, 2012 [May 7th, 2012]
- Percipio Media, LLC Proudly Accepts Partnership With MIT's Prestigious Computer Science And Artificial Intelligence ... - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Google Driverless Car Ok'd by Nevada - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel and Forrester Research Announce Free Webinar - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Wins 2012 San Francisco Business Times Tech & Innovation Award - May 13th, 2012 [May 13th, 2012]
- Internet Week 2012: Rocket Fuel to Speak at OMMA RTB - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- How to Get the Most Out of Your Facebook Ads -- Rocket Fuel's VP of Products, Eshwar Belani, to Lead MarketingProfs ... - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- The Digital Disruptor To Banking Has Just Gone International - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel Announce Free Webinar Featuring an Independent Research Firm - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- MASA Showcases Latest Version of MASA SWORD for Homeland Security Markets - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Bluesky Launches Drones for Aerial Surveying - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence: What happened to the hunt for thinking machines? - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- Bubble Robots Move Using Lasers [VIDEO] - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- UHV assistant professors receive $10,000 summer research grants - May 27th, 2012 [May 27th, 2012]
- Artificial intelligence: science fiction or simply science? - May 28th, 2012 [May 28th, 2012]
- Exetel taps artificial intelligence - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- Software offers brain on the rain - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- New Dean of Science has high hopes for his faculty - May 30th, 2012 [May 30th, 2012]
- Cognitive Code Announces "Silvia For Android" App - May 31st, 2012 [May 31st, 2012]
- A Rat is Smarter Than Google - June 5th, 2012 [June 5th, 2012]