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Peta Rolls came to anticipate receiving Aida's daily call at 10am.

A routine morning call from an AI voice bot was not part of the care package Rolls envisioned when she signed up for the home care but when they asked to be part of the trial several months back, the 79-year-old agreed because she wanted to help. Even though, to be honest, her expectations were low.

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

“The system would inquire ‘how are you feeling today?’ and that provides a chance if you’re feeling sick to say you felt sick, or I just say ‘I'm well, thanks’.”

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

The virtual assistant would also inquire about what the user was planning for the day and “she would respond to that properly.”

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

Bots Easing the Workload on Medical Professionals

This pilot, which has recently concluded its first phase, is one of the ways in which progress in AI technology are being taken up in the medical field.

Digital health company the provider partnered with the care organization about the program to use its advanced AI system to provide companionship, along with an opportunity for elderly recipients to report any health issues or issues for a caregiver to follow up.

A senior director, head of St Vincent’s At Home, explains the AI check-in being trialled does not replace any face to face interactions.

“Recipients still receive a weekly personal visit, but between these meetings … the [AI] system allows a daily check-in, which can then flag any possible issues to care staff or a family members,” Jones says.

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

Healthily uses open AI “with strict safety protocols” to ensure the interaction is safe and mechanisms are in place to respond to critical medical problems promptly, Campbell says. As an instance, if a patient is experiencing chest pains, it would be flagged to the medical staff and the conversation terminated so the individual could call emergency services.

Campbell thinks artificial intelligence has an significant part amid staffing shortages throughout the healthcare sector.

“What we can do very safely, using such systems, is reduce the admin burden on the staff so qualified health professionals can concentrate on doing the job that they’re trained to do,” she says.

Artificial Intelligence Long Established as You Might Think

Prof Enrico Coiera, the founder of the Australian Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, explains older forms of AI have been a common feature of medicine for a long time, frequently in “back office services” such as interpreting medical images, ECGs and pathology test results.

“Any computer program that performs a function that involves decision making in certain aspects is AI, regardless of how it achieves that,” states Coiera, who is additionally the director of the Centre for Health Informatics at Macquarie University.

“When visiting the imaging department, radiology department or pathology lab, you’ll see software in machines performing these tasks.”

Over the past decade, newer forms of AI called “deep learning” – a neural network method that allows systems to learn from very large sets of data – have been employed to interpret diagnostic scans and enhance detection, the expert notes.

Recently, a screening service became Australia’s pioneering public health initiative to introduce AI analysis tools to assist specialists in reviewing a select range of mammography images.

These represent specialized tools that still require a qualified physician to interpret the diagnosis they might suggest, and the accountability for a medical decision rests with the medical practitioner, the professor emphasizes.

AI’s Role in Early Disease Detection

A research center in the city has been collaborating with researchers from a UK university who first developed artificial intelligence techniques to detect neurological lesions known as specific brain malformations from MRI images.

These abnormalities cause seizures that often are resistant with medication, meaning surgery to remove them becomes the only treatment available. But, the procedure can proceed if the doctors can pinpoint the affected area.

A study recently released in the scientific publication, a team from the institute, headed by neurologist Emma Macdonald-Laurs, demonstrated their “AI epilepsy detective” could identify the abnormalities in nearly all of instances from MRI and PET scans in a specific form of the malformations that have historically been missed in the majority of cases (60%).

The AI was trained on the scans of 54 patients and then tested on pediatric cases and adult patients. Among the youngsters, 12 had surgery and eleven became free of seizures.

The tool uses AI algorithms similar to the breast cancer screening – flagging suspicious areas, which are subsequently reviewed by experts “speeding up the process to reach a conclusion,” the researcher explains.

She stresses the researchers are still in the “early phases” of the project, with a additional research required to advance the tool toward clinical implementation.

A leading neurologist, a neurologist who was not involved in the research, notes modern imaging now generate such huge amounts of high-resolution data that it is hard for a human to review it accurately. So for doctors the difficulty of finding these abnormalities was like “identifying the needle in the haystack.”

“It’s a great demonstration of how AI can assist doctors in making quicker, precise identifications, and has the ability to improve surgical access and outcomes for children with otherwise intractable epilepsy,” the professor comments.

Disease Detection in the Years Ahead

Dr Stefan Buttigieg, the vice-president of the international body's AI health division, explains deep neural networks are additionally used to track and forecast epidemics.

The expert, who spoke last month at the national health summit in Wollongong, cited a tech firm, a company established by medical experts and which was an early detector to identify the Covid-19 outbreak.

Generative AI is a additional branch of machine learning, in which the technology can generate new content using existing information. Such applications in medicine encompass programs such as Healthily’s AI voice bot as well as the AI scribes clinicians are increasingly using.

Dr Michael Wright, the president of the national GP body, says family doctors have been adopting AI scribes, which captures the consultation and turns into a medical summary that can be added to the patient record.

Wright says the primary advantage of the tools is that it enhances the standard of the interaction between the physician and individual.

A medical leader, the chair of the national doctors' group, concurs that AI note-takers are helping doctors optimise their time and adds artificial intelligence also has the potential to help doctors avoid duplication of tests and imaging for their patients, if the {promised digitisation|planned digitalization