Wednesday, May 17, 2023

The Continuing Progress of AI into Healthcare


 

Continuing today with the subject of AI, comes a recent article from Wired magazine about the incredible wave of AI and its applications in healthcare.

Longtime readers of the blog will remember I am a *huge* fan of Wired.  I've had a subscription since the early 1990s and I am a religious reader of every issue.

However, for some reason I missed the article I am discussing today... although it was published in January 2023, the entire premise is still incredibly current.  That's because it doesn't so much deal with AI for healthcare professionals, but instead for healthcare patients.

We are on the cusp of some pretty incredible possibilities of combining our smartphones with either AI imaging databases or some specialized hardware attachments for those devices.  Soon the age old question, "does this look infected to you?" might well have an intelligent answer.  However, that answer won't come from your friend or your mom, but from your phone.

One of the things that I personally feel is near to reality is dermatology exams.  Many folks put off having a potential area of skin cancer examined simply because they don't have time  or they figure "it's probably nothing".  Soon you'll be able to a picture of an area of concern and find out if it is something you need to schedule an appointment for.   Skin cancers are pretty cancer and can be serious if left untreated so being able to know whether you need to be examined or not is really important.

There are image libraries out there with millions of images in them and an AI system will be able to scan through them in a flash and let you know within seconds.

The article also discusses potential home ultrasound scans too.  It's a pretty fascinating read.

Follow this link to head over to Wired and check it out.  It is a short read, but I love the possibilities it describes.

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