How Artificial Intelligence Is Quietly Rewriting the Future of Healthcare (And Why It’s Time to Pay Attention)
A few years ago, your visit to the doctor looked very different.
You would be sitting in a waiting room, flipping through old magazines. Your medical history was stored in thick paper files housed behind the receptionist’s desk. Diagnoses frequently relied on the experience and intuition of a doctor and if you wanted a second opinion, you had to take your X-rays or reports from one hospital to another.
Fast forward to today and there is a clear contrast striking. Your smartwatch could alert you to an abnormal heartbeat before you even experience a symptom. AI chatbots can interview you for symptoms before your doctor calls. Smart algorithms analysed thousands of medical scans in seconds, sometimes detecting pathology that is missed by the human eye.
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare is already here, it is real, and it is changing how we think, deliver and receive medical care. And what is the best part? We are just getting started.
From Paper Charts to Predictive Analytics: A 180-Degree Shift in Healthcare
In order to gain a clear perspective on what healthcare looks like with AI, at a minimum, it is useful to consider what healthcare looked like not too long ago. Just a decade ago, medical diagnosis was an entirely human-driven process. For the radiologist, there were several processes that comprised their job. Radiologists would spend countless hours scouring one scan after another, looking for microscopic differences within hundreds of X-ray or MRI scans. It was an exhausting and stressful job. And despite having trained with the best intentions, human error is always a risk. If a radiologist missed something small, it might delay a diagnosis or alter a treatment plan, a potential risk no one wants to take. Things are changing now, and changing rapidly, and in many cases for the better.
With the help of AI in healthcare, machines can now look at thousands of images in a matter of seconds and find patterns that human eyes, trained or untrained, may miss. A large amount of medical information does this, and because of machine learning and data science, these tools are finding the early evidence of diseases, such as cancer and diabetic retinopathy, and even predicting strokes before symptoms.
This change not only affects hospitals, but it has also affected new professions. Areas in which health sciences conduct courses, such as BSc Data Science, and also top BSc Biotechnology Colleges in Bangalore, include AI and machine learning within their course content.
For students interested in biology, technology, or even public health can explore the best data science courses in Bangalore or artificial intelligence in healthcare courses, which could offer the next opportunity to work with data, and help save lives through it.