14 Transformative AI Applications in Medicine

A lot of people are worried about Artificial Intelligence (AI). What is AI going to do to our society? To our workforce? Is it going to make our jobs disappear? Is it going to harm us?

Personally, I am not worried about AI in medicine. Because I am a physician, I am more interested in what AI can do to help the medical profession. AI is becoming a transformative medical professional tool that still needs to be supervised by humans, but that is rapidly revolutionizing our medical future for the better, enhancing human medical capabilities.

Among many others, here are 14 game-changing medical applications of AI:

1. AI can analyze our tone of voice, speed of speech, and facial expressions and diagnose early depression, anxiety, or brain neuronal degeneration, which will often be missed by clinicians. That allows for more accurate diagnoses and earlier treatments for better longevity. [1]

2. AI can evaluate subtle color changes of our skin through a video of our face to extract our heart rate and blood oxygen saturation level, a technique called remote photoplethysmography (rPPG). [2]

AI can also study pictures of our eyes looking up, down, left, and right to detect COVID infection and several other diseases. [3]

3. During a routine examination with an EKG-enabled stethoscope, AI can diagnose early signs of heart failure that would not be detected by a human.[4]

4. Generative AI can already suggest diagnoses and possible treatments across all medical specialties based on the patient’s clinical symptoms, laboratory, and radiology results. With large amounts of data from large populations of patients, we can predict which treatments for depression, anxiety, PTSD, cancer, and other diseases will work and which treatments will not work. [5]

This saves time and suffering, avoiding the side effects of the wrong medications.

For cancers, AI already helps physicians understand the genomics and proteomics of tumors. Based on those, AI recommends the best personalized course of action that can be used to fight against each individual cancer instead of using the one-size-fits-all model we used to have, and in some cases, that we still currently have. [6]

5. AI is already used for training new residents and surgeons with medical simulations. Medical and surgical students won’t need to practice only on real bodies anymore.

6. AI can predict epidemic outbreaks. It can help us understand where the next outbreak will happen and where it’s going to be most severe. [7]

7. Generative AI can help drug companies synthesize new drugs and can find clinical trial candidates for those new drugs. [8]

8. Security Monitoring of health care computers: We already use AI programs for cyber-protection with hospital monitoring systems 24 hours per day. AI can monitor all computers for all out-of-the-ordinary activity. If the AI sees something unusual, increased frequency, increased activity, or suspicious activity in a particular server, it will immediately shut down that server and send a message to the cybersecurity team so that they can start investigating.

9. Radiology: AI will be able to tell from a chest X-Ray, not only what is abnormal in the lungs, but also what else is abnormal in the surrounding tissues: bones, heart, vessels, lymph nodes, breasts, etc.

AI can tell better than a human if, in a CT scan, a nodule less than 1 cm in diameter is cancerous, and if the nodule is cancerous, whether there is a risk of recurrence after resection. [9]

In some facilities, AI is already used to produce radiology reports that are better understood by patients (who often see their reports before their physician calls them).

10. Pathology: AI will be used for analyzing cells and detecting cancerous cells in biopsies. It is especially useful in interpreting the meaning of borderline cells. Are the cells cancerous or not? AI can make the diagnosis better than a human in borderline cases because the computer (digital pathology) can see malignant elements of the biopsy that are so tiny that the human eye cannot discern them —even with a powerful microscope — and that would have been considered as normal before. [10]

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11. Preventative Medicine: AI will help in the study of genetics and, based on the patient’s individual genomic study, recommend personalized preventative actions for each individual.

12. In remote areas where the medical care is sparse and in areas where physicians and nurses are overwhelmed, it will be possible to have hospitals with AI-driven robots of physicians and nurses, AI-interpreted vitals, EKGs, X-Rays, blood tests, and robots administering treatments. Already, researchers at Tsinghua University in China have announced they have created a model of an AI hospital with virtual AI physicians who can treat 10,000 virtual patients in just a few days. [11]

13. Here in the US, AI is used in some medical offices to transcribe summary notes of office visits so that physicians can spend most of their time directly interacting with their patients.

14. Also, AI can summarize very complicated, long charts in a simple, short way that will save physicians time.

In summary, thanks to supervised-by-human Artificial Intelligence, the tasks of physicians will become simpler, faster, and more accurate. AI is a game changer that will allow better personalized medicine, better targeted treatments, and more satisfied patients.