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Peta Rolls came to anticipate getting the AI's daily check-in each morning.

A routine morning call from an AI voice bot wasn't initially included in the service the participant envisioned when she signed up for the in-home support but 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 hopes weren't high.

Even so, when the call came through, she says: “I was amazed by how interactive she was. It was impressive for a robot.”

“The system would inquire ‘how you are today?’ and that gives you an opportunity if you feel unwell to mention your symptoms, or I might reply ‘I'm well, thanks’.”

“She would go on to ask questions – ‘did you manage to go outdoors today?’”

Aida would also ask what the user was planning for the day and “she would respond to that properly.”

“When I mentioned I’m going shopping, it would ask are you shopping for clothes or groceries? It was quite engaging.”

AI Reducing the Workload on Medical Professionals

The trial, which has now wrapped up its first phase, is one of the ways in which advances in artificial intelligence are being integrated in the medical field.

Digital health company the provider approached St Vincent’s regarding the trial to use its generative AI technology to provide companionship, along with an opportunity for elderly recipients to log any health issues or issues for a staff member to address.

A senior director, head of the home care division, says the AI check-in under evaluation does not replace any in-person visits.

“Clients still receive a weekly face to face meeting, but between these meetings … the [AI] system enables a daily check-in, which can then flag any possible issues to care staff or a client’s family,” the director says.

The managing director, the managing director of Healthily, says there have been no any negative events noted from the St Vincent’s trial.

The company employs advanced AI “with very clear guardrails and prompts” to ensure the interaction is secure and procedures are established to address serious health issues promptly, the director states. As an instance, if a client is reporting heart symptoms, it would be alerted to the medical staff and the call ended so the individual could call emergency services.

She believes AI has an significant part given staffing shortages across the healthcare sector.

“What we can do very safely, with technology like this, is reduce the admin burden on the staff so qualified health professionals can focus on doing the job that they’re trained to do,” she says.

AI Not as New as You Might Think

An expert, the co-founder of the national AI health alliance, says older forms of AI 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 carries out a task that requires judgment in certain aspects is artificial intelligence, irrespective of how it achieves that,” states the professor, who is also the head of the Centre for Health Informatics at a leading university.

“If you go the radiology unit, radiology department or pathology lab, you will find programs in equipment performing these tasks.”

Over the past decade, newer forms of artificial intelligence called “deep learning” – an algorithmic approach that allows algorithms to learn from extensive datasets – have been employed to read diagnostic scans and enhance detection, the expert notes.

Recently, BreastScreen NSW became the nation's first population-based screening program to adopt machine reading technology to support specialists in reviewing a select range of mammography images.

They are advanced systems that still require a qualified physician to evaluate the findings they might suggest, and the responsibility for a medical decision rests with the medical practitioner, Coiera emphasizes.

AI’s Role in Identifying Illness Early

A research center in the city has been collaborating with scientists from a UK university who pioneered AI methods to detect epilepsy brain abnormalities known as specific brain malformations from MRI images.

These abnormalities cause seizures that often are resistant with drugs, so surgery to excise the tissue becomes the only treatment available. However, the surgery can only be performed if the doctors can locate the abnormal tissue.

A study published this week in the scientific publication, a group from the research body, led by neurologist the lead researcher, demonstrated their “neural network tool” could detect the abnormalities in nearly all of cases from advanced imaging in a specific form of the malformations that have historically been overlooked in more than half of patients (sixty percent).

The system was trained on the scans of 54 patients and then tested on 17 children and adult patients. Among the youngsters, twelve underwent operations and eleven became free of seizures.

The tool employs AI algorithms comparable with the breast cancer screening – highlighting regions of abnormality, which are subsequently reviewed by experts “speeding up the process to reach a conclusion,” Macdonald-Laurs explains.

She stresses the team are currently in initial stages of the work, with a further study necessary to advance the tool heading towards clinical implementation.

A leading neurologist, a neurologist who was independent from the study, says modern imaging now produce such huge amounts of high-resolution data that it is hard for a person to go through it accurately. So for doctors the difficulty of finding these lesions was like “identifying the needle in the haystack.”

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

Illness Identification in the Future

A public health expert, the vice-president of the international body's AI health division, explains advanced AI systems are additionally used to monitor and predict disease outbreaks.

Buttigieg, who presented last month at the Public Health of Australia’s conference in the city, gave as an example a tech firm, a company established by infectious disease specialists and which was an early detector to identify the coronavirus pandemic.

Content-creating AI is a additional branch of deep learning, in which the system can produce original material using training data. These uses in medicine include tools such as Healthily’s AI voice bot as well as the AI scribes doctors and allied health professionals are increasingly using.

Dr Michael Wright, the head of the national GP body, reports family doctors have been adopting digital assistants, which records the consultation and converts it to a consultation note that can be included in the patient record.

The president states the main benefit of the tools is that it improves the quality of the interaction between the doctor and patient.

A medical leader, the president of the Australian Medical Association, concurs that scribes are assisting physicians manage schedules and adds AI can also help to help doctors avoid repeated examinations and scans for their clients, if the {promised digitisation|planned digitalization