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Peta Rolls came to anticipate getting Aida's daily call at 10am.

A routine morning call by an automated voice assistant wasn't initially included in the service 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 79-year-old agreed because she wanted to help. Although, truth be told, her expectations weren't high.

Even so, when the call came through, she states: “I was so overtaken by how responsive 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’re feeling sick to mention your symptoms, or I just say ‘I'm well, thanks’.”

“The AI would then pose questions – ‘have you had a chance to step outside today?’”

Aida would also ask what Rolls had planned for the day and “it would reply appropriately.”

“If I would say I plan to go shopping, it would ask are you shopping for clothes or groceries? I found it entertaining.”

Bots Easing the Workload on Medical Professionals

This pilot, which has recently concluded its initial stage, is an example in which progress in artificial intelligence are being integrated in healthcare.

Digital health company Healthily partnered with the care organization regarding the program to utilize its generative AI technology to provide social interaction, along with an opportunity for elderly recipients to report any health issues or issues for a caregiver to address.

A senior director, head of the home care division, says the AI check-in being trialled is not a substitute for any face to face interactions.

“Recipients still receive a weekly face to face meeting, but between these meetings … the [AI] system allows a routine call, which can then flag any potential concerns to either our team or a client’s family,” the director notes.

The managing director, the CEO of the company, says there haven’t been any negative events noted from the pilot program.

Healthily uses open AI “with strict safety protocols” to guarantee the interaction is secure and procedures are in place to address serious health issues promptly, the director says. As an instance, if a client is reporting chest pains, it would be flagged to the medical staff and the call terminated so the person could dial triple zero.

Campbell thinks artificial intelligence has an significant part given staffing shortages throughout the medical industry.

“The benefit very safely, using such systems, is reduce the administrative load on the staff so qualified health professionals can focus on doing the job that they specialize in,” she comments.

AI Not as New as You Might Think

Prof Enrico Coiera, the co-founder of the national AI health alliance, explains established types of artificial intelligence have been a common feature of healthcare for a long time, often in “back office services” such as analyzing scans, cardiograms and pathology test results.

“Software that performs a function that involves decision making in some way is AI, irrespective of how it achieves that,” states the professor, who is also the head of the Centre for Health Informatics at Macquarie University.

“If you go the imaging department, radiology department or pathology lab, you will find software in equipment doing just that.”

In recent years, advanced versions of AI called “deep learning” – a neural network method that allows algorithms to analyze very large sets of data – have been employed to interpret medical imaging and improve diagnosis, Coiera says.

Recently, a screening service became the nation's pioneering population-based screening program to introduce machine reading technology to support specialists in reviewing a specific set of breast scans.

These represent specialized tools that continue to need a qualified physician to interpret the findings they could indicate, and the responsibility for a clinical judgment sits with the medical practitioner, the professor emphasizes.

AI’s Role in Identifying Illness Early

The Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in the city has been collaborating with researchers from UCL London who pioneered artificial intelligence techniques to identify neurological lesions known as specific brain malformations from brain scans.

These abnormalities cause epileptic episodes that often are resistant with drugs, meaning surgical intervention to remove them becomes the sole option. But, the surgery can proceed if the surgeons can pinpoint the affected area.

In research published this week in the journal Epilepsia, a group from the institute, headed by specialist the lead researcher, showed 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 malformations that have traditionally been overlooked in more than half of cases (60%).

The system was developed using the scans of 54 patients and then evaluated with pediatric cases and adult patients. Of the 17 children, twelve underwent operations and eleven became free of seizures.

This technology employs AI algorithms similar to the mammography analysis – flagging suspicious areas, which are subsequently reviewed by specialists “but it makes it a lot quicker to reach a conclusion,” the researcher explains.

She emphasises the researchers are still in the “early phases” of the work, with a additional research necessary to advance the tool heading towards real-world use.

Prof Mark Cook, a neurologist who was independent from the research, notes MRI scans now produce such vast quantities of high-resolution data that it is hard for a human to go through it accurately. Thus for clinicians the challenge of locating these lesions was like “searching for a needle in a haystack.”

“It’s a great demonstration of how AI can support clinicians in making earlier, more accurate diagnoses, and has the potential to improve surgical access and results for kids with otherwise intractable epilepsy,” Cook comments.

Illness Identification in the Future

A public health expert, the deputy head of the international body's digital health and artificial intelligence section, says advanced AI systems are also helping to track and forecast epidemics.

The expert, who spoke last month at the national health summit in Wollongong, cited Blue Dot, a company set up by medical experts and which was one of the first organisations to identify the coronavirus pandemic.

Content-creating AI is a additional branch of deep learning, in which the system can generate new content using training data. These uses in healthcare include tools such as the virtual assistant along with the AI scribes clinicians are increasingly using.

Dr Michael Wright, the president of the national GP body, says family doctors have been embracing digital assistants, which captures the appointment and turns into a consultation note that can be added to the patient record.

The president says the primary advantage of the tools is that it enhances the standard of the interaction between the doctor and patient.

A medical leader, the chair of the national doctors' group, concurs that scribes are helping physicians optimise their time and adds artificial intelligence also has the potential to help doctors avoid duplication of tests and scans for their clients, if the {promised digitisation|planned digitalization