In every industry, from manufacturing to transportation, sophisticated computer program's ability to accomplish a human task has helped improved efficiency. The medical treatment especially clinical intervention through hospitals are getting into it, using AI from diagnosing patients more quickly during an emergency and enabling seamless communication between doctors to minimize the risk of complications in patients.

It was IBM who brought AI into mainstream medical treatment a few years back when it introduced "jeopardy" wining system Watson to help oncologists find out the best treatment for the patients. Physicians could now feed patient's data into Watson and receive instant recommendations after the machine processed thousands of documents published in a medical journal.

Watson showed the way and it was pretty evident that AI has the potential to be game-changer in many areas of health caresystem. There has been an amazing advancement of technology in the field of analyzing various medical images like CT scan and MRIs and then produce suggestions regarding the best diagnosis comparing it with the stored databases of patients. These AI programmes can actually process these tasks more accurately and much faster than human technicians. AI has proved its potential and is ready to take on the role of assistant to every doctor and nurse.

Physicians are giving real testimony of how AI is helping them in the diagnosis process, providing guidance on a treatment plan and also predicting the future health risk. Let's take an example of the first task of diagnosing a patient's illness – an AI called Visual DX allows the doctor to provide input medical images along with patient's symptoms and immediately produce a list of possible diagnoses. It is happening regularly in Elkhart hospital in USA's Indiana province.

New York Universities Langone Medical Centre is involved in a research through which they are likely to develop an AI who will be able to predict which patient are more prone to sepsis and another AI to alert doctor about probable heart attack. The system will automatically check the records of each patient's record at the time of admission and alert the doctor who has a history/chance of a heart failure.

Artificial Intelligence is also helping the hospitals to improve their efficiency. A number of hospitals are installing programmes to optimize schedules for surgery or imaging/diagnostic tests by predicting the duration of each procedure that is scheduled on a particular day will take.

We are still awaiting the widespread adoption of AI in the hospital industry because of the doubt about its cost-benefit advantage. Hospitals are wary whether they will get a good return on their investment on deploying AI. A survey conducted in 2017 by HIMSS Analytics and Healthcare IT News found that 35% of healthcare institutions are planning to adopt AI within a couple of years, but 15% said that they could not see their business viability in adopting AI. Another 20% expressed that they thought the technology was yet to develop enough so that it could be deployed confidently.

Already, we have seen AI has been employed in-

• Assisting physicians and patients
• Analysing lab results
• Indicating patient’s emotional state
• AI-based spine surgery technology
• Researching on healthy aging
• Suggesting the best treatment for a cancer patient
• Building bionic hands
• Detecting tuberculosis
• Treating post-traumatic stress disorder among the veterans
• Improving clinical documentation
• Detecting brain bleeds

AI is definitely going to be employed in health care and hospital sector in every other way from diagnosis to treatment and prediction to prevention. However, more rigorous research is needed to push AI in all these areas of health care in a way that, it produces a more accurate result and helps the medical and hospital system to curtail their costs effectively.   

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