Tag Archives: #healthdata

AI in medicine

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Artificial intelligence has a wide range of use in every industry that we can think off. It is meant to make people’s work more efficient and more accurate. But the biggest advantage of using this algorithms is that they can conduct hard and time consuming tasks with the imperceptible margin of error.

But how AI is used in medicine?

Thanks to AI algorithms and machine learning models there are a lot of possibilities in which professionals are able to use them. Currently the most common roles of AI in this field are supporting clinical decisions and imaging analysis. The idea of clinical decision programs is to help specialist make decisions about the treatment, medications and other things that patients need. Whereas the imaging analysis is intended to analyse X-rays scans and many others to provide the information faster and more accurate. It also speeds up some process considering developing new medicine.

Recent Applications of AI in Medicine

1.Diagnose Diseases

The diagnosis part of treatment is the most crucial one. It takes years of medical training to do them correctly. What’s more it is time-consuming process, which might directly influence patients that are waiting for the treatment. That why machine learning is particularly helpful in this area. However not all diseases can be diagnosed by machines, because lack of digitalized data. Luckily there are few that AI and doctors decided to start with, here are some examples:

2.Personalized treatment

There are many different patients and they respond differently to drugs and the ways of treatment. Actually it’s not an easy task to decide what medicine will work the best in your scenario. So that specialist came up with an idea of personalized treatment method. They use the machine learning algorithms to automate the process of discovering characteristic that a specific patient will have a good response to a particular treatment. The system learns this by cross-referencing similar cases with the outcome of the treatment. It all makes much more easier work for doctors.

3. Remote medicine

Ai in this industry isn’t only meant for doctors and specialists. It is also deployed for patients directly. Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic there has been a significant growth of Ai chatbots in hospitals and small clinics to help patients recognize their health problems. They have also significantly reduced challenges people had to overcome while searching for help.

There are also applications in which you can define what are your symptoms and the algorithm will automatically say what disease are you struggling with. It will also advise you to go to see the doctor if necessary. It was especially useful during pandemic to reduce number of patients coming for appointments.

Video:

To sum up, Ai is already helping us in many aspects of medicine. There are lot more things that it optimizes and helps with. But it is just the beginning , the more we digitize medical data the more we can use AI to search new patterns. It surely is the future of our Medicine.

If you want to learn something more I advise you watching the video below. Let me know what do you think about such algorithms.

Sources:

IBM: https://www.ibm.com/topics/artificial-intelligence-medicine

Data revenue: https://www.datarevenue.com/en-blog/artificial-intelligence-in-medicine

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Google stores over 50 milion Americans’ medical records – Project Nightingale

Reading Time: 2 minutes

We all know, that leakage of personal data isn’t anything new nowadays. There are many reasons for collecting your data by big companies. Many of them focus on earning money, by targeting ads based on data concerning your behavior and interests. In Project Nigtigale’s case, however, Google aims at something much bigger.

Project Nightingale owes the name after Florence Nightingale who was an English social reformer and the founder of modern nursing in the 19th century. Project Nightingale is a data storage and processing project made by Google Cloud and Ascencion, which set on foot in early 2019. Their main goal is to design new software using artificial intelligence to predict or more quickly identify medical conditions and suggest changes to patients care. Additionally, the company aims to create a search tool that collects patients’ data into a central location. Google is said to be using medical records of more than 50 million American people from 2600 hospitals in 21 states. The shared data includes patient names and their dates of birth, along with doctor diagnoses, lab records, and hospitalization results. Health data was stored on an Ascension-owned virtual private space.

Despite its great purpose, patients and physicians across 21 states haven’t been informed about their data sharing. Because of this, there were many speculations about whether is this project morally equitable. David Feinberg – the head of Google Health – responded to all criticism.  Due to his position – a physician – he said, that he understands that health information should be private and as he refers – Google is not permitted to use that for marketing or research purposes. However, we can’t be sure that the personal pieces of information were strictly sheltered. People are afraid of the potential break-in by hackers.

The Office of Civil Rights of HHS is demanding more details about Project Nightingale to ensure HIPPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) protections have been implemented.

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Would you give up your personal data for the development of medical care in the future?

Share with us your opinion!

 

 

Author: Maciej Dziurdzia

Sources:

https://geek.justjoin.it/projekt-nightingale-google-dane-medyczne/

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/cybersecurity/10-things-to-know-about-project-nightingale.html

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/14/google-healthcare-data-ascension

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/business/google-ascension-health-data.html

 

 

 

 

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