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A senior citizen came to anticipate getting the AI's daily check-in each morning.

A daily check-in call from an AI voice bot wasn't initially included in the service the participant envisioned when she enrolled for St Vincent’s home care but when they asked to participate in the trial several months back, the elderly lady said yes because she wanted to help. Even though, truth be told, her expectations weren't high.

Nevertheless, when the call came through, she states: “I was amazed by how responsive she was. It was remarkable for a machine.”

“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 well, thanks’.”

“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 the user was planning for the day and “it would reply appropriately.”

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

AI Reducing the Workload on Healthcare Staff

This pilot, which has recently concluded its first phase, is an example in which progress in artificial intelligence are being integrated in healthcare.

Digital health company Healthily approached the care organization regarding the program to utilize its advanced AI system to provide social interaction, along with an opportunity for elderly recipients to report any health issues or issues for a caregiver to address.

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

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

The managing director, the CEO of the company, reports there haven’t been any negative events reported from the pilot program.

The company employs open AI “with very clear guardrails and prompts” to guarantee the conversation is safe and mechanisms are established to address critical medical problems promptly, the director says. For example, if a patient is reporting chest pains, it would be alerted to the care team and the conversation ended so the person could dial triple zero.

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

“The benefit securely, using such systems, is lessen the administrative load on the staff so qualified health professionals can focus on performing the duties that they’re trained to do,” she says.

Artificial Intelligence Long Established as Often Believed

Prof Enrico Coiera, the founder of the national AI health alliance, explains established types of artificial intelligence have been a standard part of healthcare for a long time, often 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 certain aspects is AI, regardless of how it achieves that,” says Coiera, who is additionally the director of the Centre for Health Informatics at a leading university.

“When visiting the imaging department, radiology department or diagnostic laboratory, you will find programs in equipment doing just that.”

Over the past decade, advanced versions of AI called “machine learning” – an algorithmic approach that allows systems to analyze extensive datasets – have been used to interpret diagnostic scans and improve diagnosis, Coiera says.

In November, a screening service became the nation's pioneering public health initiative to introduce machine reading technology to assist radiologists in interpreting a specific set of breast scans.

These represent advanced systems that continue to need a qualified physician to interpret the diagnosis they could indicate, and the responsibility for a clinical judgment sits with the healthcare provider, the professor emphasizes.

AI’s Role in Identifying Illness Early

A research center in Melbourne has been collaborating with scientists from UCL London who pioneered AI methods to detect neurological lesions known as focal cortical dysplasias from brain scans.

These abnormalities trigger seizures that crequently are resistant with medication, meaning surgery to excise the tissue becomes the sole option. However, the procedure can proceed if the surgeons can pinpoint the abnormal tissue.

A study recently released in the scientific publication, a group from the institute, headed by specialist Emma Macdonald-Laurs, demonstrated their “neural network tool” could identify the abnormalities in nearly all of instances from MRI and PET scans in a specific form of the lesions that have historically been missed in more than half of cases (60%).

The AI was developed using the images of 54 patients and then tested on pediatric cases and adult patients. Of the 17 children, twelve underwent operations and eleven became free of seizures.

The tool employs neural network classifiers similar to the mammography analysis – flagging regions of abnormality, which are still checked by experts “speeding up the process to reach a conclusion,” Macdonald-Laurs explains.

She stresses the researchers are currently in initial stages of the project, with a further study necessary to advance the tool heading towards real-world use.

A leading neurologist, a brain specialist who was independent from the study, notes modern imaging now produce such vast quantities of detailed information that it is challenging for a human 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 ability to enhance operation opportunities and results for children with treatment-resistant seizures,” Cook comments.

Illness Identification in the Years Ahead

A public health expert, the vice-president of the European Public Health Association’s digital health and artificial intelligence section, says advanced AI systems are additionally used to monitor and predict epidemics.

Buttigieg, who presented last month at the national health summit in Wollongong, gave as an example a tech firm, a organization established by medical experts and which was an early detector to detect the Covid-19 outbreak.

Generative AI is a further subset of deep learning, in which the technology can generate new content using existing information. Such applications in medicine encompass tools such as the virtual assistant as well as the automated note-takers clinicians are adopting more.

Dr Michael Wright, the head of the Royal Australian College of GPs, says family doctors have been embracing digital assistants, which records the appointment and converts it to a consultation note that can be added to the patient record.

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

A medical leader, the chair of the Australian Medical Association, agrees that AI note-takers are helping physicians manage schedules and adds artificial intelligence can also help to prevent duplication of tests and imaging for their patients, if the {promised digitisation|planned digitalization