How AI is used in healthcare and what are the benefits and possible drawbacks?

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Artificial Intelligence has many applications in many fields. Couple of those fields are economy, marketing, entertainment, banking, and healthcare. Here I want to concentrate on influence of AI in healthcare as it is major improvement and has many benefits that not many of us are aware of. Main goal is to replace the human part in many repetitive, easy but time-consuming tasks and to overall improve service quality.

Ability to process data

One of the fundamentals of AI in healthcare is machine learning. It is crucial that it can match syndromes with right disease and choose best treatment based on that diagnose and person medical record. To do that there is a huge resource of data needed including personal data. Luckily the amount of healthcare data is increasing thanks to swift development of big data analytic methods.

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Understanding and using human language

Big part that AI plays in healthcare is through Natural Language Processing. NLP is for technology to understand human language. In healthcare it allows to make unusable data, that was considered irrelevant because of the text form, understandable and usable for improving methods and better results for patients.

Rule-based expert systems

There are also expert systems that operate on rules. It is to facilitate the clinical decision-making process. However those systems have their faults. If there are too many rules some of them can collide which leads to irrelevant conclusions. Those systems are slowly replaced with machine learning.

Human-like thinking

Another subset of AI that has high input in healthcare is deep learning. Deep learning is even more useful than machine learning, but those systems are very hard to build, and many requirements have to be met. Deep learning allows computers to analyse more structured data and perform more like human brain. It allows for AI to better analyse images, videos, and multi-layered data.

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Assistance in surgeries

AI is also used for surgical robots. Systems analyses data and past operations and enables robots to come up with new better surgical techniques. The recorded results from surgeries assisted with AI robotic procedures are very promising. Patients that had their surgeries made with those devices have less after operation complications and those surgeries seem less invasive.

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Conclusion of benefits

To sum up I mentioned many beneficial things that AI brings in healthcare. It allows more precise and faster diagnosis. Replaces human impact in some of tasks which saves much time. Helps with improving and making new better techniques and also facilitate decision making. Some systems even might be able to predict diseases faster and more accurate which will result in saving many lives. Of course we still need time to improve those systems but nonetheless it looks like we are on a good track. Let us now look at the less positive side of this technology.

What are the flaws and disadvantages of this phenomenon?

Work difficulty

First those systems and devices will need to be surveillance by humans. It might be disadvantage and also potential advantage at the same time. The drawback of this is that we will need more human resource to run this industry which may lead to some delays. What I mean by that is if there is some kind of issue with systems or robots employees will need to call a specialist to help them and that may freeze the flow of work and might stop surgeries from being done on time. Also we will need more people with much greater education to run those devices. That may be a potential advantage because it will make more work places. On the other hand if we do not have enough specialists because it is not an easy educational path and it requires great knowledge to do this job it could bring for example collapse of some hospitals or companies.

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Imperfect technology

As we know artificial intelligence is not perfect and it has tendencies to be and make some biases. This is still a relatively new technology that is still being developed. Problems that it may cause might not be so significant but still could possibly make some inaccuracies. For an instance those algorithms do not take into consideration the economic background of potential patient so it could come up with solutions that are not viable in specific situation. Another possibility is that when there is not enough data or data is not suitable it can come up with malfunction diagnosis.

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Job loses

Every automatization leads to replacing humans. The case is the same in this situation. Some people will lose their jobs because there is no need to pay someone for a job when technology can do it the same or even better and faster than humans. It would be unwise to keep these people around. From point of view of employer, it is a waste of time and money.

Possible cyber crimes

Another aspect of this kind of automatization is that it uses a lot of data. Data is an information about something and if some information is stolen or falls into unwanted hands it creates trouble. Data about our health is especially sensitive and is kept secret in healthcare institutions. Making those information fully digital may bring hackers and cyber criminals because we make it easier for them to operate.

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Summary

To conclude artificial intelligence in healthcare is very important and beneficial. However we have to be aware that it has it’s flaws. Overall it brings too much advantages not to be used. Every change has upsides and downsides. Nothing is perfect especially when it is created by humans that by themselves are not perfect. Nonetheless this is the future of our society and it is certain that we should explore and develop those systems more and more but keep in the back of our heads that it is also a potential high risk investment.

Sources :

https://www.foreseemed.com/blog/machine-learning-in-healthcare

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/07/27/how-is-ai-used-in-healthcare-5-powerful-real-world-examples-that-show-the-latest-advances/?sh=1ebcf84f5dfb

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5829945/

https://www.foreseemed.com/artificial-intelligence-in-healthcare

https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/what-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-implementing-ai-in-healthcare/140058/

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