The role of AI in Healthcare

Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) the silver bullet that will make doctors all over the world unemployed? Will AI be able to outperform oncologists in creating treatment plans for cancer patients? The CEO of Kite Invent gives an in depth guide here with new perspectives on healthcare AI untangling opportunities and grand challenges within the field.

The article concludes that – “Too much information, too little time” – is the fundamental challenge facing many healthcare systems. AI may be the solution and there are many companies currently working in this space and the author is of the opinion that Watson Oncology probably stands out as the most advanced.

AI has a scent of magic, but instead of being spellbound, some underlying challenges need to be addressed:

• The approach need to be multidisciplinary combining strong AI and technical skills, with domain knowledge and designers capable of transforming the output of the algorithm into usable decision support tools
• Access to data is crucial for any algorithm using big data and AI and access to data should be a key priority for companies, universities, and governments. How to standardize and reflect the quality of data is also pivotal. 
• Design the right kind of decision support using augmenting, finding, presenting, assisting and automating techniques.  
• Collaborate with doctors and healthcare professionals outlining the exciting perspective as well as the challenges for the profession in an AI setup
• Have the patient in focus when designing AI system and ask how the designed solution can include them.