The Influence of Artificial Intelligence on Healthcare

Almost all medical interns were taught this one adage sometime in the course of their study- “Upon hearing hoof-beats, think horses, not zebras”. This was done to remind them for looking into the more common causes of a disease rather than veering off into the wilderness of exoticism. However, today, with rare and unheard of diseases springing with a frequency that even the most trained and qualified of experts have been unable to catch up to, it is time to think about the zebras after all. And this is where the role of A.I in the field of healthcare becomes prominent.

What with the benefits that A.I offers in processing and analyzing big data, especially in the area of image analytics, it can be of immense assistance in eliminating human error and producing more accurate and faster results. Data collection and analysis is not a new phenomenon. As was evident by the painstaking efforts of John Snow in Soho, London, during the 1850’s, data analysis to determine the causative agent of serious epidemics was alive and well. However today, with the burgeoning of electronic information and the general human population, it is practically impossible for a group of technically qualified human experts to deliver an accurate report based on scouring and analyzing patterns in random data sets over a matter of months-if not years- proportionate to the size of the data. This is where A.I and image analytics steps in to ease the burden off the shoulders of medical practitioners from going over years of general health reports, specialized medical reports, waveform and X-ray images.