Artificial Intelligence is coming into its own as a force that can have a significant impact on human wellbeing. When applied to healthcare, we are starting to see advances that are changing the ways care is delivered and helping to promote better outcomes for patients.
From healthcare iphone app development to robots that assist healthcare professionals, the future of AI in healthcare is promising. Let’s look at some of the ways AI is being used to improve healthcare.
Personalized Treatment
Many conditions have no one-size-fits-all approach to treatment. There are different medicines and different approaches that may be appropriate. Some patients may respond well to a particular treatment, while others may see no benefit. Some patients may even experience negative side effects or worse health complications as the result of some treatment options.
This dynamic can be a real problem for doctors. It isn’t always easy to pin down the factors that can cause some patients to respond poorly to a particular treatment. Through the use of AI, algorithms can analyze patient data to determine which factors may increase the risk for some patients. When a patient has a condition, the system could be trained to analyze patient data to determine which course of treatment will work best for the individual.
Disease Diagnosis
Disease diagnosis can be a bit of a bottleneck under some circumstances. Doctors train for years to learn how to accurately diagnose disease, and even once they are sufficiently skilled, the process can take a significant amount of time. Along with that, there may be some areas of the world where there is a demand for testing but too few doctors with the necessary knowledge and skill.
AI is already showing great potential for its ability to diagnose disease. For example, researchers have started testing AI for its ability to diagnose skin cancer. With this application, an AI system is trained to analyze images of different skin conditions. The AI can determine whether it is cancerous, the type of cancer and in some cases, it might even be able to recommend treatment options.
Enhanced Gene Editing
Gene editing is one of the most promising frontiers for the future of medicine. The only problem is that it can be hard to predict the off-target effects of different applications. This adds a significant amount of time to the research of new gene therapies.
Researchers can now develop new therapies faster by using AI to predict the ways the guide RNA will interact with DNA. Instead of having to test and see what happens, they can run simulations to see which options perform best. This eliminates the time that goes into testing options that have very little potential of being a usable treatment.
Developing New Drugs
The time and cost of developing new drugs is another issue that can make healthcare expensive and inefficient. Developing a new treatment can cost billions of dollars and it will take years to get through the many different stages of testing.
With AI, some of these costs can be reduced and drug developers will be able to get new treatments on the market in less time. AI could be used to help researchers identify the compounds that have the most potential. It could also help with clinical trials by selecting better candidates for testing and by making it easier and faster to analyze data.
Artificial Intelligence isn’t going to take the job of human healthcare professionals any time soon. Instead, it will create a range of tools that can make professionals like doctors, nurses and researchers more efficient. This will allow new treatments to reach the public sooner, make it possible for the system to serve more people and improve outcomes by making diagnostics and care more accurate and individualized.
