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How Artificial Intelligence is Improving Patient Care

Published November 10, 2022

Most of us are familiar with artificial intelligence (AI) technology because of Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri, and Amazon’s counterpart, Alexa. However, AI can be used for much more than telling you the weather or pausing your music. Across the United States, medical researchers are advancing their field and bettering patient treatment with the help of AI.

This summer, McLaren Health Center in Michigan started using AI to increase their patient load by 12x. 1,700 patients enrolled in a program that texted, called, or emailed them with specific disease-related questions. If their responses indicated signs of complication, their data was sent to a nurse for review.

New AI-assisted technology by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) may be able to detect early signs of Parkinson’s Disease. The AI is housed in a small device that looks like a Wifi router and is placed in the patient’s home. While the patient sleeps, the device monitors their breathing and assesses it for Parkinson’s Disease. So far, it has been tested on 7,787 patients, with 757 having Parkinson’s. If this device proves successful, it could revolutionize Parkinson’s Disease treatment.

Right now, researchers at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital are testing an AI program that automatically doses patients with anesthetic during surgery so that anesthesiologists can perform their other critical jobs. After rigorous testing, researchers found that the program closely matched what real anesthesiologists would do to keep their patients unconscious. However, the program adjusted the dosage as often as every 5 seconds while real anesthesiologists only adjusted every 15-20 seconds. The program’s only limitation is that it doesn’t know when the surgery starts or when it finishes.

Lung cancer treatment may be changed forever with Massachusetts’ Brigham and Women’s General Hospital’s AI-powered algorithm that can identify a non-small lung cancer cell on a CT scan within seconds. Researchers trained the AI with 787 patient scans and improved it using over 1,300 scans. In the future, this technology can be used to identify at-risk organs.

Medical treatment has come a long way since leeching and bloodletting. Every day, researchers and engineers develop new technologies and AI programs that change the way that we practice medicine and improve patients’ lives. What innovations do you see on the horizon?

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