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Artificial intelligence includes tools and instruments, not just robots, that improve health care
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NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. — At the OCTANe Medical Technology Innovation Forum, a speaker said artificial intelligence is not just about robots being used in health care, but also instruments and resources that will improve clinicians’ workloads and diagnostics.
“Artificial Intelligence is not about robotics, but more about an orchestra of available tools and instruments,” Anthony C. Chang, MBA, MPH, MS, pediatric cardiology chief intelligence and innovation officer at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, said during his presentation.
Chang said robotic processing automation is underutilized. He said it will have a big impact in health care.
“Robotic processing automation is simply having machines automating the things humans do. It is taking the robots out of the human,” he said. “If you think about some of the work done in health care, its tedious [and] repetitive, [and] it ought to be automated.”
Examples of AI in medicine
One example of AI in health care is in its use in decision support and hospital monitoring. With these, clinicians have been able to be more preventive rather than reactive, Chang said.
AI is also used in medical imaging and biomedical diagnostics.
“This is using [a] convolutional neural network to basically mimic the human optical cortex for looking at a medical image,” he said. “You no longer need to be vulnerable to human radiologists or cardiologists making a mistake in interpretation. This is already routine in some centers.”
AI is also being used for precision medicine and drug discovery.
“Drug discovery is exciting because now with AI you can built 3D models of proteins, as well as drugs that will affect these proteins, before you release it as a randomized controlled trial,” Chang said. “You will now see more and more demonstrations of drugs working rather than relying on humans and human subjects volunteering for randomized controlled trials.”
AI may improve workload, diagnostic efficiency
With AI, radiologists will be able to look at 3D and 4D images rather than flat images, he said.
“I would say that the future of health care is thinking about [AI] as a resource that most departments can use to improve workload, as well as diagnostic efficiency,” Chang said.
For clinicians, AI will add accuracy and efficiency into their practices. They can incorporate robotic process automation into their workplace to better schedule patients, help with surgery and medical imaging interpretation, and make good decisions in the ICU.
“Machine intelligence plus human cognition will solve some, if not most, problems in health care. Humans need to be in the game,” Chang said. “We can’t hand health care problems [to] AI experts and expect them to solve it all. We need to have all clinicians back in the game of getting artificial intelligence deployed in health care and medicine. It’s going to take everybody, not just the experts in data science and artificial intelligence.” – by Monica Jaramillo
Reference:
Chang AC, et al. Artificial intelligence in medicine. Presented at: OCTANe Medical Technology Innovation Forum; Oct. 28-29, 2019; Newport Beach, Calif.
Disclosure: Chang reports no relevant financial disclosures.