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Artificial intelligence has made our lives much easier since its inception. In the real world, everything is so connected with new technologies that it is simply impossible to imagine life without AI. And without any doubt, the contribution of technology to the field of medicine is the most important.
So, the issue of my talk, as it is easy to guess by the heading, is the contribution of AI to medicine.
A specially developed device in the future will be able to detect and predict the risks of heart disease. According to the British Journal of Ophthalmology, it soon will be quite possible to produce special cardiovascular screenings. In just 1 minute patients will be able to learn about the risks of heart disease. There will be no need to conduct any additional blood tests and similar frauds. Everything will be reduced to the greatest efficiency and the minimum time. This is how artificial intelligence works!
Personally, I think it’s a very cool idea. Firstly, nowadays cardiovascular diseases are very common. This is a real problem not only for older people. In addition, that’s a common fact that after the Covid-19 many people began to have heart problems. It turns out that there have become more issues concerning health.
The task of scientists is to save human lives. In many cases, medical care for late detection of the disease is already ineffective. And nothing can be done! In addition, high-quality medical care is an expensive thing. As a result, poor people do not get the necessary medical examinations. A very good thing about this new tool is that the inventors talk about its cheapness. I believe that quality medicine should be available to all segments of society, regardless of wealth.
The tool studies the blood vessels that are located in the retina of the eye. The tool takes into account various changes, makes all kinds of measurements. It turns out that blood vessels in retina and heart are closely connected, which provides a special opportunity to determine the state of the heart and even predict all sorts of risks through the retina.
Of course, this is very convenient. Any analyses require time, specified conditions, reagents or equipment. It seems to me that using this software will require less resources and human’s participation.
After all, I think it’s a wonderful invention. So far, of course, this is just an idea, confirmed by several studies. It will be quite difficult to transfer the code to real medicine. But still, artificial intelligence plays for the benefit of humanity and this is wonderful.
Sources:
AI can identify heart disease from an eye scan | University of Leeds
It is doubtlessly good that people are trying to make the detection of heart diseases easier and quicker, though we have to not forget that AI learns from examples so it would need an enormous sample of people who did and did not have heart diseases in order to learn which pattern in the retina reveals a potential problem. Now the question rises, where will all of those people come from, and how to make them participate in the testing of AI. Another question is whether it is ethical to reveal such information to people. Imagine that an IA would produce a result that one has a chance of 90% of dying of a heart attack in the next 10 years. It would make an individual very stressed and by itself increase the risk of heart disease in long-term stress conditions. Is it worth spoiling someone’s 10 years of life in order to let him know that he will die? Is it fair? Isn’t it better for a human to live happily for 10 years and decrease the chances of disease just because they are happy? How about the problem of the wrong prediction which might always happen even if the chance is very low? I think it is something that we rather should use for confirmation of a diagnosis or in very uncertain health situations. Then it could be helpful.