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Peta Rolls grew accustomed to receiving Aida's regular check-in at 10am.

A routine morning call from an AI voice bot was not part of the service the participant expected when she signed up for St Vincent’s in-home support however when they asked to be part of the trial several months back, the elderly lady agreed because she wanted to help. Even though, to be honest, her hopes weren't high.

Even so, when she got the call, she says: “I was amazed by how interactive she was. It was impressive for a robot.”

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

“The AI would then pose follow-up questions – ‘have you had a chance to step outside today?’”

The virtual assistant would also inquire about what Rolls had planned for the day and “she would respond to that properly.”

“When I mentioned I’m going shopping, she’d say nice shopping or food shopping? It was quite engaging.”

AI Reducing the Administrative Burden on Healthcare Professionals

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

Health tech firm Healthily partnered with the care organization regarding the program to use its advanced AI system to provide companionship, along with an option for elderly recipients to log any health issues or concerns for a caregiver to follow up.

Dean Jones, national director of St Vincent’s At Home, explains the AI check-in being trialled does not replace any in-person visits.

“Recipients continue to get a regular personal visit, but in between visits … the [AI] system enables a daily check-in, which can then escalate any potential concerns to care staff or a client’s family,” Jones says.

The managing director, the managing director of the company, says there have been no any adverse incidents noted from the pilot program.

The company employs advanced AI “with strict safety protocols” to ensure the interaction is safe and procedures are established to respond to critical medical problems quickly, the director states. For example, if a client is reporting chest pains, it would be flagged to the medical staff and the call ended so the individual could call emergency services.

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

“The benefit securely, using such systems, is lessen the admin burden on the staff so trained clinicians can concentrate on performing the duties that they’re trained to do,” she comments.

Artificial Intelligence Long Established as Often Believed

Prof Enrico Coiera, the founder of the Australian Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, says established types of AI have been a standard part of healthcare for a long time, frequently in “back office services” such as interpreting scans, cardiograms and pathology test results.

“Any computer program that carries out a function that requires judgment in some way is AI, regardless of how it accomplishes it,” states the professor, who is additionally the head of the Centre for Health Informatics at Macquarie University.

“If you go the radiology unit, radiology department or diagnostic laboratory, you’ll see software in equipment doing just that.”

Over the past decade, advanced versions of artificial intelligence known as “machine learning” – an algorithmic approach that enables systems to analyze extensive datasets – have been used to interpret diagnostic scans and enhance detection, Coiera says.

Recently, BreastScreen NSW became the nation's pioneering population-based screening program to adopt AI analysis tools to assist radiologists in reviewing a select range of mammography images.

They are specialized tools that continue to need a specialist doctor to interpret the findings they could indicate, and the accountability for a clinical judgment rests with the medical practitioner, Coiera emphasizes.

The Function of AI in Early Disease Detection

The Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in the city has been collaborating with researchers from UCL London who pioneered artificial intelligence techniques to detect epilepsy brain abnormalities called focal cortical dysplasias from MRI images.

These lesions cause seizures that often are resistant with drugs, so surgery to excise the tissue becomes the only treatment available. But, the surgery can proceed if the doctors can locate the abnormal tissue.

A study published this week in the scientific publication, a team from the institute, led by specialist the lead researcher, showed their “neural network tool” could identify the lesions in up to 94% of instances from MRI and PET scans in a subtype of the malformations that have traditionally been overlooked in the majority of cases (sixty percent).

The AI was trained on the images of 54 patients and then tested on 17 children and 12 adults. Of the 17 children, 12 had surgery and eleven became free of seizures.

This technology employs AI algorithms comparable with the breast cancer screening – flagging suspicious areas, which are still checked by experts “but it makes it a lot quicker to get to the answers,” Macdonald-Laurs explains.

She emphasises the researchers are still in the “early phases” of the project, with a further study required to get the technology toward real-world use.

Prof Mark Cook, a neurologist who was independent from the research, says modern imaging now produce such vast quantities of high-resolution data that it is challenging for a person to go through it accurately. Thus for clinicians the difficulty of locating these abnormalities was like “searching for a needle in a haystack.”

“It’s a great demonstration of how AI can support clinicians in making quicker, more accurate diagnoses, and has the ability to improve operation opportunities and results for children with otherwise intractable epilepsy,” the professor says.

Disease Detection in the Future

A public health expert, the deputy head of the European Public Health Association’s digital health and artificial intelligence section, says advanced AI systems are additionally used to monitor and predict disease outbreaks.

The expert, who spoke recently at the Public Health of Australia’s conference in Wollongong, cited a tech firm, a organization established by medical experts and which was one of the first organisations to identify the Covid-19 outbreak.

Generative AI is a further subset of deep learning, in which the system can generate new content based on training data. These uses in healthcare encompass tools such as the virtual assistant along with the automated note-takers doctors and allied health professionals are adopting more.

Dr Michael Wright, the head of the national GP body, reports family doctors have been embracing digital assistants, which records the consultation and converts it to a consultation note that can be added to the health file.

The president states the primary advantage of the tools is that it enhances the standard of the interaction between the doctor and patient.

Dr Danielle McMullen, the president of the national doctors' group, agrees that scribes are helping physicians manage schedules and adds AI can also help to prevent repeated examinations and imaging for their clients, if the {promised digitisation|planned digitalization