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Peta Rolls grew accustomed to getting Aida's daily call at 10am.

A daily check-in call by an automated voice assistant wasn't initially included in the care package Rolls envisioned when she signed up for the home care but when they asked to be part of the trial four months ago, the 79-year-old agreed because she wanted to help. Even though, to be honest, her expectations were low.

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

“The system would inquire ‘how are you feeling today?’ and that gives you an opportunity if you feel unwell to mention your symptoms, or I just say ‘I’m fine, thank you’.”

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

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

“If I would say I plan to go shopping, it would ask are you shopping for clothes or groceries? I found it entertaining.”

AI Reducing the Administrative Burden on Healthcare Professionals

This pilot, which has recently concluded its initial stage, is one of the ways in which advances in artificial intelligence are being integrated in the medical field.

Health tech firm Healthily approached the care organization regarding the trial to utilize its advanced AI system to offer social interaction, as well as an option for home care clients to log any health issues or issues for a staff member to follow up.

Dean Jones, national director of the home care division, explains the AI check-in being trialled does not replace any face to face interactions.

“Recipients still receive a weekly face to face meeting, but in between visits … the [AI] system allows a routine call, which can then flag any possible issues to either our team or a client’s family,” Jones notes.

Dr Tina Campbell, the CEO of the company, says there haven’t been any negative events noted from the pilot program.

The company employs open AI “with strict safety protocols” to ensure the conversation is secure and mechanisms are established to respond to critical medical problems quickly, Campbell says. For example, if a client is experiencing heart symptoms, it would be alerted to the care team and the call ended so the individual could call emergency services.

She believes AI has an important role given staffing shortages throughout the healthcare sector.

“The benefit securely, 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.

Artificial Intelligence Long Established as You Might Think

Prof Enrico Coiera, the co-founder of the Australian Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, says older forms of AI have been a standard part of healthcare for a long time, often in “back office services” such as interpreting medical images, ECGs and pathology test results.

“Any computer program that performs a function that requires judgment in some way is artificial intelligence, irrespective of how it accomplishes it,” says the professor, who is additionally the head of the health informatics center at a leading university.

“If you go the radiology unit, radiology department or diagnostic laboratory, you will find software in machines doing just that.”

Over the past decade, advanced versions of artificial intelligence known as “machine learning” – an algorithmic approach that allows systems to analyze very large sets of data – have been used to read diagnostic scans and enhance detection, the expert notes.

Recently, a screening service became the nation's first population-based screening program to introduce AI analysis tools to support specialists in reviewing a specific set of mammography images.

These represent advanced systems that continue to need a specialist doctor to interpret the findings they could indicate, and the accountability for a medical decision rests with the medical practitioner, Coiera says.

AI’s Role in Early Disease Detection

The Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne has been working alongside researchers from UCL London who first developed artificial intelligence techniques to identify epilepsy brain abnormalities known as specific brain malformations from brain scans.

These abnormalities trigger seizures that crequently are resistant with drugs, meaning surgery 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 scientific publication, a team from the institute, led by specialist Emma Macdonald-Laurs, showed their “AI epilepsy detective” could identify the lesions in nearly all of instances from advanced imaging in a subtype of the lesions that have traditionally been overlooked in more than half of patients (60%).

The AI was developed using the scans of a group of individuals and then tested on pediatric cases and adult patients. Among the youngsters, twelve underwent operations and 11 are now seizure free.

The tool employs AI algorithms similar to the breast cancer screening – flagging regions of abnormality, which are still checked by experts “but it makes it a lot quicker to reach a conclusion,” the researcher says.

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

A leading neurologist, a neurologist who was not involved in the research, notes modern imaging now produce such huge amounts of high-resolution data that it is challenging for a person to go through it accurately. Thus for clinicians the challenge of finding these abnormalities was like “searching for a needle in a haystack.”

“It’s a great demonstration of how artificial intelligence can support clinicians in making earlier, precise identifications, and has the potential to enhance operation opportunities and results for children with treatment-resistant seizures,” the professor comments.

Illness Identification in the Future

A public health expert, the deputy head of the international body's digital health and artificial intelligence section, explains deep neural networks are additionally used to track and forecast disease outbreaks.

Buttigieg, who presented recently at the Public Health of Australia’s conference in the city, cited Blue Dot, a organization established by medical experts and which was an early detector to detect the Covid-19 outbreak.

Generative AI is a additional branch of machine learning, in which the technology can generate new content based on training data. Such applications in healthcare encompass tools such as Healthily’s AI voice bot along with the automated note-takers clinicians are increasingly using.

A GP representative, the head of the national GP body, reports family doctors have been adopting AI scribes, which captures the consultation and converts it to a consultation note that can be added to the health file.

Wright states the primary advantage of the scribes is that it improves the quality of the communication between the doctor and patient.

A medical leader, the chair of the national doctors' group, agrees that scribes are helping doctors optimise their time and says AI can also help to help doctors avoid repeated examinations and scans for their patients, if the {promised digitisation|planned digitalization