Peta Rolls came to anticipate getting Aida's daily check-in at 10am.
A daily check-in call by an automated voice assistant wasn't initially included in the care package the participant expected when she signed up for the home care however when she was invited to be part of the pilot program four months ago, the elderly lady said yes because she wanted to help. Even though, to be honest, her expectations weren't high.
Even so, when the call came through, she states: “I was so overtaken by how interactive the AI was. It was remarkable for a machine.”
“She’d always ask ‘how are you feeling today?’ and that gives you an opportunity if you feel unwell to say you felt sick, or I might reply ‘I'm well, thanks’.”
“The AI would then pose questions – ‘did you manage to go outdoors today?’”
The virtual assistant would also inquire about what Rolls was planning for the day and “it would reply appropriately.”
“If I would say I’m going shopping, it would ask nice shopping or food shopping? It was quite engaging.”
Bots Easing the Workload on Healthcare Professionals
The trial, which has recently concluded its first phase, is an example in which progress in artificial intelligence are being integrated in healthcare.
Health tech firm Healthily partnered with St Vincent’s about the trial to utilize its generative AI technology to provide social interaction, as well as an opportunity for home care clients to log any health issues or concerns for a caregiver to address.
Dean Jones, head of the home care division, says the service being trialled does not replace any in-person visits.
“Clients continue to get a weekly 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 client’s family,” Jones notes.
Dr Tina Campbell, the CEO of the company, reports there haven’t been any negative events reported from the pilot program.
The company uses open AI “with strict safety protocols” to ensure the interaction is safe and mechanisms are established to address serious health issues quickly, Campbell says. As an instance, if a patient is reporting heart symptoms, it would be alerted to the care team and the conversation ended so the individual could call emergency services.
Campbell thinks AI has an important role given staffing shortages throughout the healthcare sector.
“The benefit very safely, with technology like this, is reduce the admin burden on the staff so trained clinicians can concentrate on performing the duties that they specialize in,” she comments.
Artificial Intelligence Long Established as You Might Think
Prof Enrico Coiera, the co-founder of the Australian Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, explains established types of AI have been a common feature of medicine for a considerable period, frequently in “administrative functions” such as interpreting scans, cardiograms and pathology test results.
“Any computer program that performs a task that involves decision making in certain aspects is AI, irrespective of how it accomplishes it,” states Coiera, who is also the head of the health informatics center at Macquarie University.
“When visiting the radiology unit, medical imaging center or diagnostic laboratory, you will find programs in equipment performing these tasks.”
In recent years, advanced versions of AI known as “machine learning” – a neural network method that enables systems to analyze extensive datasets – have been used to interpret diagnostic scans and improve diagnosis, Coiera notes.
Recently, a screening service became Australia’s pioneering public health initiative to adopt AI analysis tools to support radiologists in interpreting a select range of mammography images.
They are specialized tools that still require a qualified physician to evaluate the diagnosis they could indicate, and the accountability for a clinical judgment rests with the medical practitioner, the professor emphasizes.
The Function of AI in Early Disease Detection
The Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in the city has been working alongside researchers from a UK university who pioneered AI methods to identify epilepsy brain abnormalities called specific brain malformations from MRI images.
These lesions cause epileptic episodes that often cannot be controlled with medication, so surgical intervention to remove them becomes the only treatment available. But, the procedure can proceed if the surgeons can locate the affected area.
A study published this week in the journal Epilepsia, a group from the institute, headed by neurologist Emma Macdonald-Laurs, demonstrated their “neural network tool” could identify the lesions in up to 94% of cases from MRI and PET scans in a specific form of the lesions that have traditionally been overlooked in the majority of patients (60%).
The AI was trained on the images of a group of individuals and then evaluated with 17 children and adult patients. Among the youngsters, 12 had surgery and 11 are now seizure free.
The tool employs neural network classifiers similar to the breast cancer screening – highlighting regions of abnormality, which are subsequently reviewed by specialists “but it makes it a lot quicker to reach a conclusion,” Macdonald-Laurs explains.
She stresses the team are currently in initial stages of the work, with a additional research required to get the technology toward clinical implementation.
Prof Mark Cook, a neurologist who was not involved in the study, notes MRI scans now generate such huge amounts of detailed information that it is hard for a person to review it thoroughly. Thus for clinicians the difficulty of finding these lesions was like “searching for a needle in a haystack.”
“It’s a great demonstration of how artificial intelligence can support doctors in making quicker, more accurate diagnoses, and has the potential to enhance operation opportunities and results for kids with treatment-resistant seizures,” Cook comments.
Disease Detection in the Future
Dr Stefan Buttigieg, the deputy head of the European Public Health Association’s digital health and artificial intelligence section, says deep neural networks are also helping to track and forecast disease outbreaks.
Buttigieg, who presented last month at the national health summit in Wollongong, gave as an example a tech firm, a company set up by medical experts and which was an early detector to identify the coronavirus pandemic.
Content-creating AI is a additional branch of machine learning, in which the technology can generate new content based on training data. These uses in medicine include tools such as the virtual assistant along with the AI scribes clinicians are increasingly using.
A GP representative, the head of the national GP body, reports family doctors have been embracing AI scribes, which captures the appointment and turns into a medical summary that can be included in the patient record.
Wright says the main benefit of the tools is that it improves the standard of the communication between the doctor and patient.
A medical leader, the president of the Australian Medical Association, concurs that AI note-takers are assisting doctors optimise their time and adds artificial intelligence can also help to prevent repeated examinations and scans for their clients, if the {promised digitisation|planned digitalization
