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Artificial Intelligence and Your Health

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healthcare data x300by Angela Guess

Jo Best recently wrote in ZDnet, “After IBM’s Watson cruised to victory on the game show Jeopardy!, the company decided the first area where the ‘cognitive computing’ system would be put to work was healthcare — a field of sprawling data, intense privacy concerns, and life and death outcomes. Since IBM began targeting healthcare as a sweet spot for AI back in 2011, the market for artificial intelligence in the industry has grown: in 2014, it was thought to be worth $600m, and is expected to reach $6bn by 2021, according to analyst Frost & Sullivan. Venkat Rajan, global director of the Visionary Healthcare Program at Frost & Sullivan, says AI in healthcare has ‘moved from nascency and pilots and proof of concepts, to more early stage commercialisation, adoption, and utilisation’.”

Best goes on, “The industry’s interest in AI, Rajan says, has been driven both by rising costs and increasing volumes of data. ‘There isn’t necessarily the capacity to capture and process and understand all of it. I think AI, particularly a lot of early solutions, are targeting those issues — being able to take large volumes of data, put it through levels of processing that can allow some level of relevancy to crop up to support decision making and influence the course of care.’ The aim is for AI systems to do what doctors can’t always: keep up on every detail of every patient’s visit to every specialist or hospital, as well as each pertinent new piece of research, disease outbreak, and public health recommendation. The system must not only digest all that information, but also factor in the patient’s symptoms and then recommend a diagnosis or course of treatment that takes all those elements into account.”

Read more here.

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