Health Care is hemorrhaging data. AI is here to help Posted on : Dec 30 - 2017

Artificial Intelligence used to mean something. Now, everything has AI. That app that delivers you late-night egg rolls? AI. The chatbot that pops up when you’re buying new kicks? AI. Tweets, stories, posts in your feed, the search results you return, even the people you swipe right or left; artificial intelligence had an invisible hand in what (and who) you see on the internet.

But in the walled-off world of health care, with its HIPAA laws and privacy hot buttons, AI is only just beginning to change the way doctors see, diagnose, treat, and monitor patients. The potential to save lives and money is tremendous; one report estimates big data-crunching algorithms could save medicine and pharma up to $100 billion a year, as a result of AI-assisted efficiencies in clinical trials, research, and decision-making in the doctor’s office. Which is why tech titans like IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Apple are spinning up their own AI health care pet projects. And why every health-focused startup pitching Silicon Valley VCs throws in a “machine learning” or “deep neural net” for good measure.

These algorithms get better the more data they see. And health data is practically hemorrhaging out of mobile devices, wearables, and electronic medical files. But their siloed storage systems don’t make it easy to share that data with each other, let alone with an artificial intelligence. Until that changes, AI won’t be curing the world of, well, probably anything.

Which is not to say AI in health care is all hype. Sure, Watson turned out to be less cancer-crushing computer prodigy and more very expensive electrical bill. But 2017 wasn’t all flops. In fact, this year saw artificial intelligence begin demonstrating real concrete usefulness inside exam rooms and out.

In the doctor’s office, AI is already helping dermatologists tell cancerous growths from harmless spots, diagnose rare genetic conditions using facial recognition algorithms, and lending an assist in reading X-rays and other medical images. Soon, it will be detecting signs of diabetes-related eye disease in India. But image classification isn’t the only thing it’s getting good at; AI can also mine text data. That kind of tech undergirds a platform that gives any primary care doc access to the expertise of specialists from all over the world. No more waiting six months for that referral you can’t really afford anyway. And after you get that diagnosis, you can now take home an AI-equipped robot to help you stick to your treatment plan. It nags, but it looks cute while it’s doing it.

Health care-focused AI has also seeped into virtual care, as medicine experiments with ways to offer preventive care and between-visit support via the omnipresent smartphone.  View More