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Peta Rolls grew accustomed to getting the AI's daily check-in at 10am.

A daily check-in call from an AI voice bot wasn't initially included in the service Rolls expected when she enrolled for the in-home support however when they asked to participate in the pilot program four months ago, the 79-year-old said yes because she wanted to help. Although, truth be told, her expectations were low.

Even so, when the call came through, she states: “I was so overtaken by how responsive the AI was. It was impressive for a robot.”

“She’d always ask ‘how you are today?’ and that provides a chance if you feel unwell to mention your symptoms, or I just say ‘I’m fine, thank you’.”

“The AI would then pose follow-up questions – ‘did you manage to go outdoors today?’”

The virtual assistant would also inquire about what the user was planning for the day and “she would respond to that properly.”

“When I mentioned I plan to go shopping, she’d say are you shopping for clothes or groceries? I found it entertaining.”

AI Reducing the Administrative Burden on Medical Professionals

This pilot, which has now wrapped up its first phase, is an example in which advances in artificial intelligence are being integrated in the medical field.

Digital health company Healthily approached St Vincent’s about the program to utilize its advanced AI system to offer companionship, as well as an opportunity for elderly recipients to report any medical concerns or concerns for a caregiver to follow up.

Dean Jones, head of St Vincent’s At Home, explains the service being trialled does not replace any in-person visits.

“Recipients continue to get a regular face to face meeting, but in between visits … the automated system allows a routine call, which can then escalate any possible issues to care staff or a client’s family,” the director notes.

The managing director, the CEO of the company, reports there have been no any negative events noted from the pilot program.

Healthily uses advanced AI “with strict safety protocols” to guarantee the conversation is safe and mechanisms are established to respond to serious health issues quickly, the director states. For example, if a patient is reporting heart symptoms, it would be alerted to the medical staff and the conversation ended so the individual could call emergency services.

She believes artificial intelligence has an important role given significant workforce challenges across the healthcare sector.

“The benefit very safely, using such systems, is lessen the administrative load on the workforce so qualified health professionals can concentrate on performing the duties that they’re trained to do,” she says.

AI Not as New as Often Believed

An expert, the co-founder of the Australian Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, says established types of AI have been a standard part of healthcare for a long time, frequently in “back office services” such as interpreting medical images, cardiograms and pathology test results.

“Software that performs a task that involves decision making in certain aspects is AI, irrespective of how it achieves that,” states Coiera, who is also the director of the health informatics center at a leading university.

“When visiting the radiology unit, medical imaging center or pathology lab, you will find software in machines performing these tasks.”

Over the past decade, advanced versions of artificial intelligence known as “deep learning” – a neural network method that enables systems to analyze extensive datasets – have been used to interpret medical imaging and enhance detection, Coiera notes.

Recently, BreastScreen NSW became Australia’s first public health initiative to adopt machine reading technology to assist radiologists in interpreting a specific set of breast scans.

They are specialized tools that still require a specialist doctor to evaluate the findings they might suggest, and the accountability for a clinical judgment sits with the medical practitioner, Coiera emphasizes.

AI’s Role in Identifying Illness Early

The Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in the city has been collaborating with scientists from UCL London who pioneered AI methods to identify epilepsy brain abnormalities known as specific brain malformations from MRI images.

These abnormalities cause seizures that often cannot be controlled with medication, so surgical intervention to excise the tissue becomes the only treatment available. But, the surgery can proceed if the surgeons can pinpoint the affected area.

A study recently released 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 nearly all of instances from advanced imaging in a specific form of the lesions that have historically been missed in the majority of cases (60%).

The AI was developed using the images of 54 patients and then evaluated with pediatric cases and 12 adults. Of the 17 children, 12 had surgery and 11 are now seizure free.

The tool uses AI algorithms similar to the breast cancer screening – highlighting regions of abnormality, which are subsequently reviewed by experts “but it makes it a lot quicker to reach a conclusion,” Macdonald-Laurs says.

She emphasises the team are currently in initial stages of the work, with a further study required to get the technology toward clinical implementation.

Prof Mark Cook, a neurologist who was independent from the study, notes modern imaging now produce such vast quantities of detailed information that it is challenging for a person to review it accurately. So for doctors the difficulty of finding these abnormalities was like “identifying the needle in the haystack.”

“It’s a great demonstration of how artificial intelligence can assist clinicians in making earlier, more accurate diagnoses, and has the potential to enhance surgical access and outcomes for kids with otherwise intractable epilepsy,” the professor comments.

Disease Detection in the Future

Dr Stefan Buttigieg, the deputy head of the international body's digital health and artificial intelligence section, says advanced AI systems are additionally used to track and forecast epidemics.

The expert, who presented last month at the Public Health of Australia’s conference in Wollongong, gave as an example Blue Dot, a organization set up by infectious disease specialists and which was an early detector to identify the coronavirus pandemic.

Content-creating AI is a further subset of machine learning, in which the system can produce original material based on existing information. Such applications in healthcare include tools such as the virtual assistant along with the AI scribes doctors and allied health professionals are increasingly using.

A GP representative, the head of the Royal Australian College of GPs, reports family doctors have been embracing digital assistants, which records the consultation and turns into a consultation note that can be included in the health file.

The president states the main benefit of the tools is that it enhances the standard of the communication between the physician and individual.

A medical leader, the president of the Australian Medical Association, agrees that scribes are assisting doctors manage schedules and adds AI also has the potential to prevent duplication of tests and scans for their patients, if the {promised digitisation|planned digitalization