How AI is reshaping the medical landscape
You can already find it in some emergency rooms — and soon we’ll see it in every aspect of health care.
Artificial intelligence in health care carries huge potential, according to experts in computer science and medicine, but it also raises serious questions around bias, accountability and security.
“I think we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg right now,” said Yoshua Bengio, a computer scientist and professor at the University of Montreal, who was recently awarded the Turing Award, often called the “Nobel Prize” of computing.
Bengio is one of the pioneers of deep learning, an advanced form of AI, which he believes will advance health care. In deep learning, a computer is fed data, which it uses to make assumptions and learn as it goes — much like our brain does.
Scientists are already using AI to develop medical devices. At the University of Alberta, researchers are testing an experimental bionic arm that can “learn” and anticipate the movements of an amputee.
Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a tool that can look at your retina and automatically detect signs of diabetic blindness.
And it is expected that AI will soon affect all aspects of health care.
The ability to disseminate huge amounts of information quickly will have a big impact on medical diagnoses, and medical experts believe pathology, dermatology and radiology will likely be the first to see these changes.
“All these images right now are processed by people who painstakingly have to look at all the details and check for problems. Machines will do that in a very systematic way and they can be trained to be as good or better than doctors or technicians at these tasks,” said Bengio.
But he believes machine learning can go beyond that.
“Designing new drugs can take 15 years and cost billions and billions of dollars,” he said. “There will soon be ways to streamline that process.”
At Humber River Hospital in northwest Toronto, AI is speeding up perhaps the most frustrating part of a patient’s experience: the emergency room.
In the hospital’s control centre, powerful computers are now accurately predicting how many patients will arrive in the emergency department — two days in advance.
