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A senior citizen came to anticipate receiving the AI's daily check-in at 10am.

A daily check-in call by an automated voice assistant was not part of the care package the participant envisioned when she enrolled for St Vincent’s in-home support but when they asked to participate in the pilot program four months ago, the 79-year-old agreed because she wanted to help. Even though, to be honest, her hopes were low.

Nevertheless, when she got the call, she states: “I was amazed by how interactive the AI was. It was remarkable for a machine.”

“The system would inquire ‘how you are today?’ and that provides a chance if you feel unwell to say you felt sick, or I might reply ‘I’m fine, thank you’.”

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

Aida would also inquire about what Rolls was planning for the day and “it would reply appropriately.”

“When I mentioned I plan to go shopping, she’d say nice shopping or food shopping? I found it entertaining.”

AI Reducing the Administrative Burden on Healthcare Staff

This pilot, which has now wrapped up its initial stage, is an example in which advances in artificial intelligence are being taken up in healthcare.

Digital health company the provider approached St Vincent’s about the trial to utilize its generative AI technology to provide social interaction, along with an option for elderly recipients to log any health issues or concerns for a staff member to follow up.

A senior director, head of St Vincent’s At Home, explains the AI check-in under evaluation does not replace any in-person visits.

“Recipients continue to get a weekly personal visit, but in between visits … the [AI] system enables a daily check-in, which can then flag any possible issues to either our team or a family members,” the director says.

Dr Tina Campbell, the CEO of Healthily, reports there haven’t been any negative events reported from the St Vincent’s trial.

The company uses open AI “with very clear guardrails and prompts” to guarantee the interaction is safe and mechanisms are in place to address critical medical problems promptly, Campbell says. 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 artificial intelligence has an significant part given significant workforce challenges across the medical industry.

“The benefit securely, with technology like this, is lessen the admin burden on the workforce so trained clinicians can focus on doing the job that they specialize in,” she says.

Artificial Intelligence Long Established as You Might Think

An expert, the co-founder of the Australian Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, says older forms of artificial intelligence have been a common feature of healthcare for a considerable period, often in “administrative functions” such as interpreting medical images, ECGs and pathology test results.

“Any computer program that performs a task that requires judgment in certain aspects is artificial intelligence, regardless of how it accomplishes it,” states Coiera, who is additionally the head of the Centre for Health Informatics at a leading university.

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

Over the past decade, newer forms of AI called “deep learning” – an algorithmic approach that allows systems to learn from very large sets of data – have been used to interpret medical imaging and improve diagnosis, the expert notes.

In November, BreastScreen NSW became the nation's pioneering population-based screening program to introduce machine reading technology to support radiologists in reviewing a select range of mammography images.

They are advanced systems that still require a qualified physician to interpret the findings they might suggest, and the accountability for a clinical judgment rests with the medical practitioner, the professor says.

AI’s Role in Early Disease Detection

The Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne has been collaborating with scientists from UCL London who pioneered artificial intelligence techniques to identify epilepsy brain abnormalities called specific brain malformations from brain scans.

These abnormalities trigger epileptic episodes that often are resistant with medication, meaning surgical intervention to excise the tissue becomes the sole option. However, the surgery can only be performed if the surgeons can pinpoint the abnormal tissue.

In research recently released in the journal Epilepsia, a team from the institute, led by neurologist Emma Macdonald-Laurs, showed their “AI epilepsy detective” could identify the lesions in nearly all of cases from advanced imaging in a specific form of the lesions that have traditionally been overlooked in the majority of cases (60%).

The AI was trained on the scans of 54 patients and then evaluated with 17 children and adult patients. Among the youngsters, 12 had surgery and eleven became free of seizures.

The tool employs neural network classifiers similar to the mammography analysis – highlighting regions of abnormality, which are subsequently reviewed by specialists “but it makes it a lot quicker to reach a conclusion,” the researcher explains.

She emphasises the researchers are currently in initial stages of the work, with a additional research required to get the technology heading towards real-world use.

A leading neurologist, a neurologist who was not involved in the study, notes modern imaging now produce such vast quantities of detailed information that it is hard for a person to review it thoroughly. So for doctors the challenge of finding these abnormalities was like “searching for a needle in a haystack.”

“This illustrates of how AI can support clinicians in making earlier, more accurate diagnoses, and has the ability to improve surgical access and results for children with treatment-resistant seizures,” the professor says.

Illness Identification in the Future

Dr Stefan Buttigieg, the deputy head of the international body's AI health division, says deep neural networks are also helping to track and forecast disease outbreaks.

Buttigieg, who presented recently at the national health summit in Wollongong, cited Blue Dot, a organization set up by infectious disease specialists and which was one of the first organisations to detect 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 encompass tools such as the virtual assistant along with the automated note-takers doctors and allied health professionals are increasingly using.

A GP representative, the head of the national GP body, reports family doctors have been embracing AI scribes, which records the consultation and converts it to a medical summary that can be included in the patient record.

Wright states the primary advantage of the scribes is that it enhances the quality of the interaction between the physician and individual.

Dr Danielle McMullen, the chair of the Australian Medical Association, agrees that AI note-takers are helping physicians optimise their time and adds AI can also help to help doctors avoid repeated examinations and imaging for their patients, if the {promised digitisation|planned digitalization