When medicine meets AI

With the emergence of the Internet, all walks of life have begun to embrace the Internet, and now with the emergence of AI, the same is true. For the medical industry, what role can the help of AI bring to the application of the medical industry? Let’s take a look at this analysis.

In the early days of the Internet, all walks of life embraced the Internet; to today's various AI, all walks of life have begun to embrace artificial intelligence again, and the constant is always change; the same is true for the medical industry, the previous online medical care, the Internet Medical care, smart hospitals, and Internet hospitals are connected to the Internet in various forms. Nowadays, various AI applications such as speech recognition, image recognition, intelligent consultation, intelligent diagnosis, and assisted decision-making systems are continuously penetrating into various medical scenarios.

Why do we need to add AI as a friend after adding the Internet? Ultimately, its essence is to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and provide better service experience for participants in the medical industry (not just patients). Whether it is the Internet or AI, combined with medical treatment, it generally has the following purposes:

• Expand the radius of medical services: This is easy to understand, that is, to break through the physical space of medical services, and push forward 30 years before medical care has had its first contact with the Internet. All medical services basically require medical service providers to face Provided by patients; the emergence of the Internet has broken through the limitations of physical space for medical activities such as registration, consultation, prescribing and purchasing medicines;
• Improve the level of medical services: increase service efficiency and quality, and improve service experience;
• Relieve the strain on medical resources;
• Promote the rational allocation of medical resources: scientific and intelligent allocation and dispatch of medical resources.

1. Integration of AI medical treatment

If we want to know how AI can find its use in the medical field, we should first understand what the basic capabilities of AI are. According to the definition of artificial intelligence from the Dartmouth Conference in the United States in 1956: simulating, extending, and expanding human intelligence, allowing machines to perceive, recognize, make decisions, and execute like humans; among which there are four: perception, cognition, decision-making, and execution. Dimensional ability level is one of the ways to judge the level of artificial intelligence today; perhaps perception, cognition, decision-making and execution are relatively abstract. How can these abilities be combined with medical care? Then we will further refine these four abilities. To put it into perspective, with my simple understanding of AI, I can at least have the following capabilities:

• Speech recognition, semantic analysis;
• Image recognition, image processing;
• Machine learning, deep learning;
• Speech synthesis, image synthesis.

We now know the basic capabilities of AI, but how do these capabilities play a role in medical services? Let’s take the process of outpatient treatment and hospitalization as an example. When a patient comes to the hospital, he needs to go through: registration-interview-test-diagnosis-confirmation-fill in medical records-hospitalization-medication-ward rounds-update medical records-test-diagnosis-recovery-discharge-return Home-take medicine-follow-up-re-examination (if you don’t need to be hospitalized, you can directly pay for the medicine and go home).

• When a patient registers online and does not know which department to enroll in, through intelligent consultation, AI extracts text information and associates the medical knowledge map to determine the department;
• When patients consult online, AI extracts text information in the conversation, standardizes medical terminology, automatically generates medical record reports, issues prescriptions, and conducts intelligent review;
• Currently, all physiological sign detection needs to be carried out in medical institutions. If one day a portable bracelet or other wearable device can be used to carry out specific physiological indicator data required for basic diagnosis (and be approved by hospital doctors), Perhaps the miniaturization of medical-grade equipment for home use will bring breakthroughs in online medical care;
• When the patient returns home from treatment, AI intelligently generates a rehabilitation plan and follow-up reminders based on the patient’s medical records and subsequent data monitoring, and can adjust intervention measures in real time based on changes in data. Can this reduce the risk to a certain extent? Physician workload.

Above we have understood the basic capabilities of AI and the basic process of outpatient medical treatment, then the integration of AI capabilities and medical service scenarios (only medical services, medicine, medical insurance, and health insurance are not analyzed here), in the direction of medical services This can at least be reflected in the following aspects:

• Extraction of specific medical information from text;
• Standardization of medical terminology;
• Processing and computing of medical data;
• Generation and review of medical reports or records;
• Recognition and comparison of medical images;
• Intelligent consultation and guidance;
• Detection and prediction of physiological indicators;
• Diagnose based on medical conversation.

The integration of AI and medical care is comprehensive. The above are just examples to illustrate the possible application of AI in the outpatient medical treatment process. With the development and maturity of AI, it is foreseeable that AI will play a greater role in both breadth and depth. the value of.

2. Application of AI medical treatment

Whether it is Internet medical care or AI medical care, the main body is always medical care. We cannot put the cart before the horse. The Internet and AI are only empowerment and blessing, and whether it is the Internet or AI, at least for now, it has not been done. It has subverted medical care, so in the end the scenario of AI being implemented in medical care will probably remain unchanged. AI is like a catalyst to promote medical care in terms of service space, service channels, service processes, service industries, service objects, and business models.

3.Finally

The first thing to do when going to the hospital is testing. Without testing, medicine cannot be prescribed and treatment cannot be performed; patients with chronic diseases also need to frequently monitor physical signs. Without offline medical institutions, accurate and hospital-approved health tests cannot be performed. Without test data, doctors will not be able to provide a series of subsequent medical services. This is also the limitation of today's Internet medical (hospital) online services. Just imagine one day if AI or other technologies can help patients conveniently detect important data at home and be recognized by doctors and hospitals, that would be great!

Just like the nanorobots imagining in "Subverting Medical Care" in the future that swim in human blood vessels, they monitor human body data in real time, and are connected to family doctors or medical institutions on the other end for early detection, early intervention and early treatment. For emergency patients, missing the golden rescue time means death.

For patients, another unavoidable issue with online consultation or online medical services is patient trust. An expert doctor who conducts consultation and communication with patients online may not be as effective as an ordinary doctor offline. Face-to-face consultation with patients is just like although online meetings are very convenient now, many important meetings still and must require offline participants to gather together for meetings. From a service perspective, communication between doctors and patients requires not only Trust also requires temperature. If one day in the future AR/VR or other technologies can realize that there is not much difference between remote communication and actual face-to-face communication, this will eliminate the trust problem of patients and make online medical services more and more warm, that would be great!

Reference reports: "In-depth Research Report on China's Medical AI Industry Chain in 2023", "The Tao and Wisdom of Medical AI Innovation"

Columnist

andy, WeChat public account: PM Dabai, a small veterinarian in the product manager industry, a small veterinarian in the manager industry

This article was originally published on Everyone is a Product Manager. Reprinting without permission is prohibited

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