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A senior citizen grew accustomed to getting Aida's regular check-in at 10am.

A routine morning call by an automated voice assistant was not part of the service Rolls expected when she enrolled for the in-home support but when they asked to participate in the trial four months ago, the elderly lady said yes because she wished to contribute. Although, truth be told, her hopes weren't high.

Nevertheless, when she got the call, she says: “I was so overtaken by how responsive she was. It was impressive for a robot.”

“She’d always ask ‘how you are today?’ and that gives you an opportunity if you feel unwell to mention your symptoms, or I just say ‘I'm well, thanks’.”

“She would go on to ask questions – ‘have you had a chance to step outside today?’”

The virtual assistant would also inquire about what the user was planning for the day and “it would reply appropriately.”

“When I mentioned I plan to go shopping, she’d say nice shopping or food shopping? It was quite engaging.”

Bots Easing the Administrative Burden on Medical Professionals

This pilot, which has now wrapped up its initial stage, is one of the ways in which advances in artificial intelligence are being taken up in the medical field.

Digital health company Healthily partnered with the care organization regarding the trial to use its advanced AI system to provide social interaction, along with an option for home care clients to log any medical concerns or concerns for a staff member to follow up.

Dean Jones, head of the home care division, explains the service under evaluation is not a substitute for any face to face interactions.

“Clients still receive a regular face to face meeting, but in between visits … the automated system enables a daily check-in, which can then escalate any potential concerns to care staff or a family members,” Jones notes.

The managing director, the CEO of Healthily, reports there have been no any adverse incidents reported from the pilot program.

Healthily employs open AI “with very clear guardrails and prompts” to ensure the interaction is safe and procedures are in place to respond to serious health issues promptly, Campbell states. As an instance, if a client is experiencing heart symptoms, it would be alerted to the medical staff and the call terminated so the individual could dial triple zero.

Campbell thinks artificial intelligence has an important role given significant workforce challenges across the medical industry.

“The benefit very safely, with technology like this, is lessen the administrative load on the staff so qualified health professionals can focus on doing the job that they’re trained to do,” she comments.

Artificial Intelligence Long Established as You Might Think

Prof Enrico Coiera, the founder of the Australian Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, says older forms of AI have been a common feature of medicine for a long time, frequently in “back office services” such as analyzing scans, cardiograms and pathology test results.

“Software that carries out a task that requires judgment in certain aspects is AI, irrespective of how it achieves that,” says the professor, who is additionally the director of the Centre for Health Informatics at a leading university.

“If you go the radiology unit, radiology department or pathology lab, you’ll see programs in machines performing these tasks.”

In recent years, newer forms of artificial intelligence called “deep learning” – an algorithmic approach that enables systems to learn from extensive datasets – have been used to read diagnostic scans and improve diagnosis, the expert notes.

Recently, BreastScreen NSW became Australia’s first population-based screening program to introduce machine reading technology to support radiologists in reviewing a select range of mammography images.

These represent specialized tools that continue to need a qualified physician to interpret the findings they might suggest, and the accountability for a medical decision rests with the healthcare provider, Coiera emphasizes.

The Function of AI in Early Disease Detection

A research center in the city has been collaborating with scientists from a UK university who pioneered artificial intelligence techniques to identify neurological lesions known as focal cortical dysplasias from MRI images.

These lesions trigger seizures that often cannot be controlled with drugs, meaning surgery to remove them becomes the sole option. But, the procedure can only be performed if the doctors can pinpoint the abnormal tissue.

In research recently released in the journal Epilepsia, a team from the institute, led by neurologist the lead researcher, showed their “AI epilepsy detective” could identify the abnormalities in nearly all of cases from advanced imaging in a specific form of the malformations that have traditionally been missed in the majority of patients (60%).

The AI was developed using the images of 54 patients and then tested on pediatric cases and adult patients. Among the youngsters, 12 had surgery and 11 are now seizure free.

The tool uses AI algorithms comparable with the mammography analysis – highlighting regions of abnormality, which are subsequently reviewed by specialists “speeding up the process to get to the answers,” Macdonald-Laurs explains.

She stresses the team are still in the “early phases” of the work, with a additional research necessary to get the technology heading towards real-world use.

Prof Mark Cook, a neurologist who was independent from the research, says MRI scans now generate such huge amounts of high-resolution data that it is hard for a person to go through it accurately. So for doctors the difficulty of locating these lesions was like “identifying the needle in the haystack.”

“It’s a great demonstration of how artificial intelligence can assist clinicians in making earlier, precise identifications, and has the ability to improve operation opportunities and results for children with otherwise intractable epilepsy,” Cook comments.

Illness Identification in the Future

Dr Stefan Buttigieg, the vice-president of the international body's AI health division, explains deep neural networks are also helping to monitor and predict epidemics.

Buttigieg, who spoke last month at the Public Health of Australia’s conference in the city, cited a tech firm, a company set up by infectious disease specialists and which was one of the first organisations to detect the Covid-19 outbreak.

Content-creating AI is a further subset of machine learning, in which the system can generate new content using existing information. These uses in healthcare encompass tools such as Healthily’s AI voice bot along with the automated note-takers doctors and allied health professionals are adopting more.

Dr Michael Wright, the head of the national GP body, says family doctors have been embracing AI scribes, which captures the consultation and converts it to a consultation note that can be added to the patient record.

The president says the primary advantage of the scribes is that it improves the standard of the interaction between the physician and individual.

Dr Danielle McMullen, the chair of the Australian Medical Association, concurs that AI note-takers are helping physicians optimise their time and says artificial intelligence can also help to prevent duplication of tests and imaging for their patients, if the {promised digitisation|planned digitalization