Digital Health News reporter Laura Stevens explores how the brave new world of artificial intelligence is now being applied to healthcare, the huge potential opportunities and the new ethical and privacy challenges it raises.
Digital Disruptors artificial intelligence
The unsettling yet fascinating power of artificial intelligence is a favourite dystopian trope for film-makers. From robots taking over the world to falling in love with an operating system, the future seems to be disconcertingly jam packed full with this particular technology.
However, stepping back from Hollywood into the world of the NHS, how much do these fantastic scenarios relate to healthcare reality?
Firstly, while it may not be a mature technology, AI is definitely not a tool from the future; its in use right now by allowing researchers to compute vast amounts of data and replicating clinicians professional opinions.
The computational power of AI has been demonstrated in dermatology, cardiology and cancer research, where its analysis has provided an unbiased support to clinical opinion.
Secondly, there are huge challenges facing the introduction of this cutting edge technology into the health service, from creaky IT infrastructure, unverified data and patient data confidentiality.
The altruistic power of AI Nature recently published the results of a Stanford University study that found algorithms matched dermatologists when identifying skin cancer in photographs. The machine learning was trained on 129,450 images of 2032 different diseases, and when tested against 21 clinicians it achieved performance on par with all tested experts.
Roberto Novoa, a clinical assistant professor at the university and co-author of the study, said that while further research was needed as it was a proof of concept study, there is significant potential for AI within dermatology. The possibilities chiefly lie with smartphones being able to dramatically improve access to life-saving medical care.
The study said that the technology can potentially provide low-cost universal access to vital diagnostic care through mobiles, meaning there is the potential to profoundly expand access to vital medical care.
Brett Kuprel, a fellow co-author on the study, described the automated diagnosis of skin cancer as having the power to help people in rural communities and poor countries who may not have access to premium healthcare.
Predicting when you die
Another AI trial that made headlines recently was the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences research into computers predicting with 80% accuracy when a patient with a heart disorder will die.
The software used advanced image processing to build up a virtual 3D heart (as shown below), which when combined with eight years worth of patient data, could predict survival rates.
Declan ORegan from the institute led the research and explained the team studied patients with pulmonary hypertension, which often affects young people and rapidly leads to heart failure. For the treatment what is important to know is the risk that an individual patient wont be survive 12 months, he explained.
However, these predictions can be difficult given the number of tests available and knowing what weight to give to each, so that was the motivation for using this AI approach as many different tests could be interpreted simultaneously and very rapidly.
AI doing research humans could never do The sheer power of AI to process vast quantities of information is something also noted by Chris Bakal, a team leader at the Institute of Cancer Research. While for decades, decision making and interpretation has been done by humans, now AI allows us to take this information and make decisions using an unbiased way and using quantitated information, he said.
I think that information is going to have to be processed by AI because its literally so much information, so complicated, that humans cant do it.
But while the processing can be done by technology and it is likely to be an aid to decision making shortly, Bakal is clear that for at least a long time, the clinician is going to have the final decision.
Artificial barriers for AI in healthcare As AI relies on learning from huge amounts of data, it needs to have access to said data. For ORegan, this is where the challenges lie as you have to link confidential information to companies who can analyse it.
We need to break down some of the artificial barriers that might prevent machine learning being used more in clinical work, ORegan said. There are issues around confidentiality which are important to maintain, but its finding smart solutions that can enable machine learning to be used in healthcare.
The DeepMind and Royal Free debacle Mention AI and the NHS, and you cant miss out the controversy thats stalked the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust and Google DeepMinds work on its acute kidney injury app, Streams, despite the app being billed as not using AI. New Scientist revealed in May last year the partnership had involved giving the company a huge haul of patient data.
As a result there was a huge public backlash and an on-going investigation by the Information Commissioners Office. However, Royal Free stuck to its guns and confirmed a five year deal with DeepMind in December last year.
DeepMind has also been involved with other NHS trusts. These include Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust to deploy Streams; University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in a research partnership for head and neck cancer; and at Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust to apply machine learning algorithms to automatically detect and segment eye scans.
Dodgy data and shaky infrastructure There are not only patient confidentiality issues. Owen Johnson, a senior teaching fellow in computing at the University of Leeds, said there is a huge problem with implementing this technology in the NHS.
The NHS has underinvested in its core infrastructure, and it needs to invest in its core infrastructure, as it cannot keep putting smart technology on top of shaky technology, he said.
The fragility of IT infrastructure is a common refrain across the NHS. Just this month, St Georges University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust reported a lack of investment has resulted in an end of life infrastructure that is likely to fail and result in catastrophic implication for the Trust in terms of corporate and clinical systems failures.
In December, Johnsons local hospital, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust believed 30 out of its 300 most critical IT systems and archived records may fail without warning due to being held on old systems and insufficient data storage and computers.
Bakal agreed with Johnsons concerns about infrastructure. For AI, the computational infrastructure is quite heavy and so theres no way its going to be at most clinics in the NHS, he said. To counter this, Bakal said the power of cloud computing could be utilised.
Johnson also pointed out that that the data that AI is basing its work on is fallible through ordinary human error and practice. While the data may be safe for clinical practice, that doesnt necessarily mean that reusing that data for an AI engine can be done safely or reliably, he said.
An extra pair of belts and braces For most of the AI experts I spoke to the conclusion was that AI will shortly be in use in a clinical setting, but as an aid to decision making. As Johnson described it: an additional pair of belts and braces.
But there is inescapability to the impact of AI on healthcare, says ORegan, to be able to fully exploit the increasingly rich information thats available about patients health, I think its inevitable really, were going to have to use computers more often to make better sense of the data.
Excerpt from:
Laura's Digital disruptors: healthcare gets smart on AI - Digital Health
- 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]