The Morphing Face of
Healthcare in the World of AI
A
By Pratik Pawar
rtificial Intelligence (AI) is a
hot topic, simply put - it’s a
way of making a computer
think intelligently, in a way
human think and over a decade now
it has managed to be fairly successful.
It has found application in several
domains, from consumer electronics
like smartphones and smart home
devices like Amazon’s Alexa to very
niche applications in academic research.
What began as a nascent academic
pursuit to enable computers to think
and solve problems using human-like
cognitive capabilities has now invaded
most aspects of human life, medicine
and healthcare being no exception.
Modern medicine has discovered
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Volume 4 | Issue 1 | January-March 2019
around 60,000 ways things can go
wrong with the human body and
over thousands of years have probed
these illnesses and disorders to better
understand and treat them, one drug,
one technique at a time. In recent years,
however, there has been a dramatic
shift in the pace of innovation in
healthcare, especially with the advent
of artificial intelligence. Artificial
Intelligence is an umbrella term used
to cover a wide array of algorithms
which mimic human cognitive
functions and are self-correcting, and
can ‘learn’ from a dataset.
A MOUNTAIN OF UNSTRUCTURED DATA
One area where AI would do heaps
of help to physicians and medical
practitioners is to deal with the
insurmountable amount of clinical
unstructured data. Nearly 80% of the
clinical information is “unstructured”
and in a format incomprehensible to
health information systems. Thus,
getting useful information from these
so-called
unstructured
databases
becomes a labor-intensive task. To top
that, clinical data is doubling every
three years; which leaves the healthcare
system with a massive volume of
unsorted
heterogeneous
patient
information which may hold answers
to several health challenges, but strictly
speaking is of little use in its current
form. This challenge in healthcare of
too much data, too little insight can
be alleviated by employing Natural