AI innovations helping healthcare

Even as AI wows us with its prowess every week, healthcare is benefitting from this emerging technology like never before. While our trust in AI as healthcare aids is still a topic of research, AI is definitely providing that push to healthcare to innovate.

Recently, Google launched a new medical chatbot named AMIE focused on expert-level differential diagnosis. Research leads Alan Karthikesalingam and Vivek Natarajan are behind the creation of the chatbot. While Google’s previous AI model Med-PaLM 2 gave medical summaries and answered questions, AMIE acts as a diagnostic tool.

Remarkable advances in AI-driven drug discovery will potentially pave the way for new treatments for diseases like cancer, AIDS, TB, and malaria

Bill Gates

Recently, Bill Gates was vocal about AI in healthcare in his blog post. “Remarkable advances in AI-driven drug discovery will potentially pave the way for new treatments for diseases like cancer, AIDS, TB, and malaria. Meanwhile, researchers worldwide are working on AI tools to combat antibiotic resistance, treat high-risk pregnancies, and even give students personalized tutors—something that would transform education everywhere. These are just a few examples of how the technology can be a tremendous force for good,” he says.

In May, Google DeepMind introduced AlphaFold 3, a groundbreaking AI model that can predict the structure and interactions of all life’s molecules with amazing precision. It claims to be 50% better compared with existing prediction methods, doubling the prediction accuracy in some cases.

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AI is now helping CRISPR by generating blueprints for microscopic biological mechanisms that can edit DNA, leading the way for scientists to fight illness and diseases with even greater precision and lesser time than today.

AI is doing wonders in prosthetics as well. For example, Atom Limbs utilizes advanced sensors and machine learning to interpret electrical signals from an individual’s brain and use them to move and manipulate a prosthetic limb.

In February, University of California, Berkeley researchers showed an AI-trained surgical robot sew stitches without assistance, a giant step toward robots that can help surgeons with such tasks. The researchers took a video that shows a two-armed robot making six stitches on imitation skin. While this can spark a debate about replacing surgeon jobs in the near future, such autonomous surgeon robots could be a great help in areas that lack medical personnel.

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In December 2022, Intel Labs and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn Medicine) used federated learning, a distributed machine learning (ML) AI approach, to aid international healthcare and research institutions in identifying malignant brain tumours. While the news is good, the technique used is privacy-preserving, a pressing matter in healthtech.

Like in any other industry, AI has been driving innovation in healthtech. The speed at which AI is entering our lives might be daunting, but its advent can help with healthcare situations where we often found ourselves helpless before.