AI&U Episode 13 - AI and Health Care AI&U - Sharad Gandhi and Christian Ehl

AI in Healthcare

100 years ago medical knowledge doubled every 150 years.
Now it doubles every 73 days.
800,000 journal articles are published every year.
Human genome has 3 billion data points.
We need AI just to keep up.
http://fortune.com/2018/08/22/toby-cosgrove-cleveland-clinic-brainstorm-health/

Some big healthcare challenges with a promise of benefiting from AI and automation:

● Diagnosis and Treatment Plan
○ Fast with expert level accuracy
○ Economical and accessible for all
● Patient Remote Monitoring With Emergency Detect
● Elderly Care
● Detection and spread of new infections
● Precision medicine
● Clinical Trail Eligibility Assessment
● Drug Discovery
○ Faster and Cheaper

Healthcare costs have been rising steeply for many years coupled with a severe shortage of professionals like doctors, nurses and caretakers in most developed countries. Chronic illnesses, as opposed to infectious diseases, need a long-term management of health for a population with growing number of elderly people. Most important need in healthcare today is quick, cheap, accurate, readily accessible expert level diagnosis of most common current illnesses. Use of AI and robotic technology for automating diagnosis and medical procedures seems the only way out to satisfy healthcare needs.

Details on some new methods of diagnosis leveraging AI:

Skin Cancer.
● http://news.stanford.edu/2017/01/25/artificial-intelligence-used-identify-skin-cancer/
● https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/26/14396500/ai-skin-cancer-detection-stanford-university
● Google’s image recognition AI was used as a starting point
● 130,000 validated samples used for training AI
● Covers over 2000 skin diseases – incl. Melanoma
● 2000 gold standard used for testing AI vs. 21 expert dermatologists – AI achieved 91% accuracy
● With melanomas, for example, the human dermatologists correctly identified 95 percent of malignant lesions and 76 percent of benign moles. In the same tests, the AI was correct 96 percent of the time for the malignant samples, and 90 percent of the time for harmless lesions.
● 5.4 million new cases of skin cancer diagnosed in the US every year
● Chances of survival 97% for early diagnosis and treatment but falls to 14% in 5 years.

AI to predict cardiovascular risks – from retina image.

• Google scientists trained AI with a medical dataset and eye scans of nearly 300,000 patients.
• Rear interior wall of the eye (the fundus) is chock-full of blood vessels that reflect the body’s overall health.
• Accurately deduce an individual’s age, sex, blood pressure, BMI, Diabetic, and whether they smoke.
• AI predicts risk of suffering a major cardiac event.
• https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/19/17027902/google-verily-ai-algorithm-eye-scan-heart-disease-cardiovascular-risk
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-018-0195-0#Fig2
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-018-0195-0/figures/2

AI to diagnose Parkinson’s – in just 3 minutes

• At King’s College Hospital, London, with Tencent and Medopad
• Patients need to wear no sensors or devices – no hospital visit needed
• Motor function assessment – normally takes half hour by professional
• 10 million people worldwide live with Parkinson’s
• https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45760649/

AI to spot early signs of Alzheimer’s – before your family does

• Wireless tracking thousands of movements every day looking for subtle changes in behavior and sleep patterns:
• Sleeping or fallen
• Gait speed
• Sleep patterns
• Location
• Breathing pattern
• MIT’s AI Machine Learning predicts the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. Not obvious in the early stages.
• https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609236/ai-can-spot-signs-of-alzheimers-before-your-family-does
• Wireless tracking with AI: http://news.mit.edu/2018/artificial-intelligence-senses-people-through-walls-0612