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

A routine morning call by an automated voice assistant was not part of the care package Rolls envisioned when she signed up for the home care however when she was invited to be part of the pilot program several months back, the 79-year-old said yes because she wanted to help. Even though, to be honest, her expectations weren't high.

Nevertheless, when she got the call, she states: “I was amazed by how responsive 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 might reply ‘I’m fine, thank you’.”

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

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

“If I would say I plan to go shopping, she’d say nice shopping or food shopping? It was quite engaging.”

Bots Easing the Workload on Medical Professionals

This pilot, which has now wrapped up its initial stage, is an example in which progress in AI technology are being integrated in the medical field.

Health tech firm the provider approached St Vincent’s about the trial to utilize its generative AI technology to offer social interaction, as well as an option for elderly recipients to report any medical concerns or issues for a staff member to follow up.

Dean Jones, head of the home care division, says the service being trialled does not replace any face to face interactions.

“Recipients continue to get a regular face to face meeting, but in between visits … the automated system allows a routine call, which can then escalate any possible issues to either our team or a client’s family,” the director notes.

Dr Tina Campbell, the managing director of Healthily, says there have been no any adverse incidents noted from the pilot program.

Healthily uses open AI “with very clear guardrails and prompts” to ensure the interaction is safe and mechanisms are in place to respond to serious health issues quickly, the director states. For example, if a client is reporting chest pains, it would be flagged to the care team and the call terminated so the individual could call emergency services.

She believes artificial intelligence has an important role given staffing shortages across the medical industry.

“The benefit securely, with technology like this, is lessen the administrative load on the workforce 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

Prof Enrico Coiera, the co-founder of the national AI health alliance, explains established types of AI have been a common feature of healthcare for a long time, frequently in “back office services” such as interpreting scans, cardiograms and lab reports.

“Any computer program that carries out a task that involves decision making in some way is artificial intelligence, regardless of how it accomplishes it,” states the professor, who is also the head of the health informatics center at Macquarie University.

“When visiting the imaging department, radiology department or diagnostic laboratory, you’ll see software in machines doing just that.”

Over the past decade, newer forms of AI known as “deep learning” – a neural network method that allows algorithms to learn from extensive datasets – have been used to read medical imaging and enhance detection, the expert says.

In November, BreastScreen NSW became the nation's pioneering public health initiative to introduce machine reading technology to support specialists in reviewing a select range of breast scans.

They are specialized tools that still require a qualified physician to evaluate the findings they could indicate, and the accountability for a clinical judgment sits with the healthcare provider, the professor says.

AI’s Role in Early Disease Detection

The Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in the city has been collaborating with scientists from UCL London who first developed AI methods to detect neurological lesions known as specific brain malformations from brain scans.

These lesions cause epileptic episodes that often cannot be controlled with medication, so surgical intervention to excise the tissue becomes the sole option. But, the procedure can proceed if the surgeons can pinpoint the abnormal tissue.

In research recently released in the scientific publication, a group from the research body, headed by specialist Emma Macdonald-Laurs, showed their “neural network tool” could identify the abnormalities in up to 94% of instances from advanced imaging in a subtype of the malformations that have traditionally been overlooked in the majority of cases (sixty percent).

The AI was developed using the images of a group of individuals and then tested on pediatric cases and adult patients. Among the youngsters, 12 had surgery and eleven became free of seizures.

The tool uses neural network classifiers comparable with the breast cancer screening – highlighting suspicious areas, which are still checked by specialists “but it makes it a lot quicker to get to the answers,” the researcher explains.

She emphasises the team are still in the “early phases” of the project, with a further study necessary to get the technology toward clinical implementation.

A leading neurologist, a neurologist who was not involved in the study, says MRI scans now produce such huge amounts of detailed information that it is challenging for a human to go through it accurately. Thus for clinicians the difficulty of finding these lesions was like “searching for a needle in a haystack.”

“This illustrates of how artificial intelligence can assist clinicians in making quicker, more accurate diagnoses, and has the ability to enhance operation opportunities and outcomes for kids with otherwise intractable epilepsy,” the professor says.

Disease Detection in the Future

Dr Stefan Buttigieg, the deputy head of the European Public Health Association’s AI health division, explains deep neural networks are also helping to track and forecast epidemics.

Buttigieg, who spoke last month at the national health summit in the city, cited a tech firm, a company set up by medical experts and which was an early detector to identify the coronavirus pandemic.

Content-creating AI is a additional branch of machine learning, in which the system can generate new content using existing information. Such applications in medicine encompass 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 embracing AI scribes, which records the consultation and turns into a consultation note that can be included in the patient record.

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

A medical leader, the president of the Australian Medical Association, agrees that scribes are helping doctors manage schedules and says artificial intelligence also has the potential to prevent duplication of tests and scans for their clients, if the {promised digitisation|planned digitalization