Two unlikely interweaving sciences, artificial intelligence and biomedicine, have changed our health and lives. These two sciences have now intertwined further, aiding scientists, medical professionals, and, ultimately, all of us to improve our ongoing health so we can live better lives. This article will introduce some of the ways these two sciences are working together to solve medical mysteries and problems that have plagued us for generations.
Combining With Artificial Intelligence
The field of biomedical sciences is quite broad, dealing with several disciplines of scientific and medical research, including genetics, epidemiology, virology, and biochemistry. It also incorporates scientific disciplines whose fundamental aspects are the biology of health and diseases.
In addition, biomedical sciences also aim at relevant sciences that include but are not limited to cell biology and biochemistry, molecular and microbiology, immunology, anatomy, bioinformatics, statistics, and mathematics. Because of this wide breadth of areas that biomedical sciences touches, the research, academic, and economic significance it spans are broader than that of hospital laboratory science alone.
Artificial intelligence, applied to biomedical science, uses software and algorithms with complex structures designed to mirror human intelligence to analyse medical data. Specifically, artificial intelligence provides the capability of computer-trained algorithms to estimate results without the need for direct human interactions.
Some critical applications of AI to biomedical science are clinical text mining, retrieval of patient-centric information, biomedical text evaluation, assisting with diagnosis, clinical event forecasting, precision medicine, data-driven prognosis, and human computation.
Medical Decision Making
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed an AI model that can automate the critical step of medical decision-making. This process is generally a task for experts to identify essential features found in massive datasets by hand.
The MIT project automatically identified the voicing patterns of patients with vocal cord nodules (see graphic below). These features were used to predict which patients had or did not have the nodule disorder.
Vocal nodules may not seem like a critical medical condition to identify. However, the field of predictive analytics has increasing promise, allowing clinicians to diagnose and treat patients. For example, AI models can be trained to find patterns in patient data. AI has been utilised in sepsis care, in the design of safer chemotherapy regimens, to predict a patient’s risk of dying in the ICU or having breast cancer, among many others.
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