The Role of AI in Medical Healthcare and How It Can Influence Indian Hospitals

The very idea of artificial intelligence being integrated into regular society sounded like a distant dream a decade ago, yet now, it has become the talk of the town all across the world. With its endless ability to analyze almost limitless amounts of data that flows throughout the internet in just a few seconds. It has slowly become an integral part in the world of healthcare, providing more than enough aid for the diagnostics that are required for the patients, taking extra amounts of care for planning specific treatments and ensuring patients are given the best care as provided by the hospital or healthcare center.

The Pathology sector of healthcare has noticed a massive surge of change ever since the introduction of Artificial Intelligence, and with the proper utilization of both intelligent algorithms and machine learning models that evolve and update endlessly, getting tasks done from within the hospital will be much more effective and efficient. 

The adoption of AI Systems into the medical healthcare sectors of the country has been in a very quick and constant state of change ever since it first arrived. It has been a great time saver for both private and public sectors of Indian Medical Healthcare. There have been multiple different startups that have created advanced AI tools to provide both Radiologists and pathologists with much better decision making ability and effectiveness. This will help make up for the various different challenges that many hospitals are facing in India, such as experiencing a large shortage of professional doctors and nurses, having lots of diseases, conditions and issues pile up over time and healthcare options that are very uneven all across the country. Taking all of these complications with a lot of thought, India has been able to greatly benefit from innovations that were made from AI.

How can AI help in the Pathological sector? 

Pathology is considered by many distinguished doctors and physicians to be one of the backbones for Indian diagnostics. With the help of AI, it has long since past what it once was, embracing what it can potentially do with the proper set of hands guiding it. The traditional and now-obsolete way to handle any particular pathological issue is to perform a very complex set of tasks, preparing the sample under a microscope as well as dealing with human error. With the help of AI-powered pathological labs, the tissue samples are scanned as quickly as possible from machines that have built-in programs for finding certain medical conditions such as the presence of cancerous cells in the body, finding tuberculosis and other very specific viral infections that are known to affect the body the most.

There have been multiple companies that have been developing fully integrated AI systems into various different hospitals, where their systems have been shown to scan histopathological files a lot quicker and much more accurate than humans. Indian companies such as SigTuple have platforms that use AI for screening purposes such as scanning blood smears in the body, urinary samples, as well as semen samples. All of these are provided with expert precision which have been able to portray much better results than those made by humans.

AI systems have also been able to provide the diagnosis of people living in remote areas remotely and without the aid of physicians, who would have trouble with the limited amount of resources that are in the rural area itself. Thanks to the occurrence of 5G across the country as well as linking devices to the cloud, Medical AI can create very detailed and simplified slides for urban medical centers where an expert will be able to review them and send a detailed diagnosis for the affected individual.

What is the purpose of having AI in the field of Radiology? 

Radiology is an extremely complex field of medical science that AI is slowly taking over. There are now tools that can follow the algorithm based on the latest radiological news and trends, and find fractures a lot quicker than normal, and conditions that affect the lungs of an individual much earlier than anticipated. The AI system that has been integrated into the google search engine, for example, has shown to have a much greater accuracy in finding specific breast cancer in a varied amount of mammograms when compared to human radiologists.

Indian companies such as Qure.Ai have shown to develop tools such as qXR and qER, which have been able to scan plenty of x-rays of both the chest as well as the brain. These AI systems have been able to find powerful tools that can provide early diagnosis for people who are suffering from tumors and tuberculosis among other medical conditions.

Using AI in radiology has shown a significant increase in both diagnostic accuracy as well as the prioritization of cases that have entered the critical phase. AI have actually been used to alert the doctors of any serious complications that may have risen by the presence of brain hemorrhages. AI usage in medical centers have also been taken as a means of lessening the amount of interpretation time as well as making reports much more standardized. This has ultimately led to healthcare efforts becoming much more effective.

How can AI be used for making clinical health decisions?

With AI becoming the new norm across the country, the medical sector has been quick to properly utilize its potential as well as the decision making process it has. WIth the help of AI, many doctors and nurses are relying on AI algorithms to properly diagnose diseases correctly, choose the specific treatments for the conditions, and finally, allow the AI system to suggest taking an evidence based option for the treatment issued.

There have been many instances where the following has occurred, such as with IBM Watson, where AI systems were used to provide lots of assistance for oncologists in searching for very suitable treatment plans against cancer cells. Indian AI Tools have been made for major hospitals such as Apollo and Fortis to help doctors give out certain medications for diabetes and other very serious and chronic medical conditions.

AI has also been responsible for heavily accelerating the discovery of drugs found inside the body of a patient. Now, instead of waiting for several months to even potentially years of drug trial and error tests, the models developed by urban Indian companies have been able to find out certain chemical compounds that have some sort of reaction against human proteins, which has been shown to inevitably lower the discovery of new drugs from many years to just a couple of months. AI has especially become a great source of knowledge and help for governments during the COVID-19 pandemic, finding potential drug repurposing as well as vaccine development support.

What are the different challenges that AI finds in Medical Healthcare?

• There are many inconsistencies between the data being presented by the internet and the AI. This is because the sources vary too much for the AI to clump together what it can find commonly. This has led to hospitals still valuing hand-written prescriptions and medical bills.
• AI in healthcare can only have a positive effect in areas where AI is used generally and on a daily basis, such as in cities and other urban areas. It becomes much more difficult to provide crisp and high quality AI data to places where AI can not be accessed or even used.
• A lot of hospitals still remain wary about the impact of AI in the medical world, where they are extremely concerned about the accountability and bias of data that is presented towards the more accomplished healthcare centers.
• Using AI for finding medical knowledge can often lead to multiple different sources of the same issue, each having their own variation of the same topic. There are also several instances where the clinical validation of the topics that are brought up by AI, are more often than not misguided and are unable to bring about any sort of correct sources for the topic.

What does the future of AI look like for Medical Healthcare?

Healthcare in India has such a bright and promising future thanks to the integration of AI in the system. This is especially promising once you realize how constrained the Indian healthcare system actually is. India is currently in the middle of creating some breakthrough initiative that causes AI to flourish in an environment that is purely dedicated to the growth of artificial intelligence. This has allowed more hospitals to allow AI to seamlessly integrate itself into their systems to provide a much easier alternative for quick and efficient hospital work and diagnosis which ensures the safety and efficacy of the patients at a much better percentage than regular doctors and physicians.

With the proper amount of planning and research, AI systems that are integrated into the hospital will become a very valuable asset that can provide the same amount, potentially even more, of the knowledge that world class doctors and nurses bring to the table. India also has more than enough manpower to take after the AI systems all day long, making it a very strong contender for  a global leader for healthcare made by AI. Currently, there are bound to be many more challenges that are found in AI than solutions, but, in due time, India will pull through with the boundless potential AI brings with it.

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