The healthcare sector has used AI to advance many areas of patient care, such as improving diagnosis, prescribing therapies and educating patients through digital health programs. It has also been used to reduce risk while expanding the various capabilities and enabling organizations to do more with less, particularly during a global pandemic.

Fremont, CA: Artificial intelligence is frequently represented in popular movies and TV dramas as a technology that is determined to take over the planet. Only a few weeks ago, a new series on Fox premiered, underlining "a crooked AI with the ability to constantly improve itself that could spell harm to humankind."

Luckily for us, these ominous pictures are not what's really going on, where AI can actually save lives and improve work-life balance. AI's basic task is to combine massive data sets, quicker and more effectively than any human being could, and to analyze patterns that could prove useful. This helps people working with AI to concentrate on more critical things, while the AI sifts only the information that requires attention through the context data and surfaces.

The healthcare sector has used AI to advance many areas of patient care, such as improving diagnosis, prescribing therapies and educating patients through digital health programs. It has also been used to reduce risk while expanding the various capabilities and enabling organizations to do more with less, particularly during a global pandemic. Perhaps the greatest benefit of AI is yet to be realized: to relieve workers of time-intensive, manual tasks; to minimize burnout; and to help concentrate precious human time on those tasks of the highest value.

AI Expands the capability of the medical staff

A fascinating aspect of AI is that technology, in most cases, serves as an extension of its staff, increasing the capacity of experts to be more effective. Advanced technology is not a replacement for human expertise, as human input is an essential part of the AI relationship. Examples of the increasing relationship between AI and subject matter experts can be seen in recent medical research.

Some forms of AI have been trained to "understand" pictures. These systems have been shown to be as good or better than qualified physicians to detect tuberculosis in chest x-rays or to pick up cancer cells in a large microscopy image. Computers do not suffer from fatigue or mistake in the same way as a human being might do after a long day of imaging. Furthermore, some AI algorithms can predict adverse cardiovascular outcomes at a more reliable rate than humans using the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association guidelines.

However, it must be understood that in both of these instances, it was human expertise that taught the machines what they wanted to understand and is now working with them after their data analysis has been completed. Also the most advanced aircraft with an autopilot always needs a true pilot's judgment in the cockpit.