Artificial Intelligence: innovation and progress in Healthcare

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In recent years, the healthcare sector has been profoundly transformed by technology, in particular by the combination of Artificial Intelligence and big data. The use of new technologies has become fundamental to ensure increasingly personalized care to the patient, to increase the speed and accuracy of interventions and to help hospitals manage the flow of patients, with an improvement in internal organization and a decrease in costs for the hospital itself. 

The Epocal Summit event, promoted by GE Healthcare and sponsored by the Ministry of Health, showed a 665% increase in A.I. investments applied to Life Sciences from 2015 to 2019. 

Artificial Intelligence: from data integration to preventive medicine

“A multidisciplinary approach and analysis that integrates a patient’s medical history with familiarity and diagnosis are critical in a clinical landscape where diseases are becoming increasingly articulated. In order to improve the quality of clinical performance we must consider several factors: from this perspective, data science allows us to associate data with great speed and precision, providing effective support to specialists in the decision-making process”, explains Victor Savevski – Chief Innovation Officer of Humanitas, leading Humantas AI Center – about the growing need to correlate diagnostics and clinical observation.

New technologies also mark a shift in preventive medicine, as they make it possible to determine the presence of conditions and diseases well in advance from the onset of symptoms. The early detection of a disease has a number of benefits both for the patient’s health and for the hospital and the health system, since it allows planning resources in advance. 

Humanitas clinical research is already moving in this direction with the AI Center, a multidisciplinary team of biomedical engineers, data scientists, managers and physicians working together to improve clinical quality and open new lines of study.

Innovation and savings in hospital organization

An example of profitable organization of resources, thanks to new technologies, is the Humbert River Hospital in Toronto, which coordinates patient flow and treatment by means of a real-time data analysis system developed by GE Healthcare. An innovation that has shown great practical utility since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing the facility to save $11.5 million and increase beds by 35 with unchanged staffing.

In addition, the use of Artificial Intelligence in hospital organization and for the prediction of possible critical events is of particular relevance when it comes to critical care. The Hypotension Prediction Index (Hpi), for example, is a software that associates and evaluates a large database of clinical cases, with the use of A.I. for predictive purposes, in order to promptly identify the probability of an individual patient’s clinical status worsening. 

Diagnostic imaging and new technologies

Another great revolution is represented by the union between diagnostic imaging and AI. Thanks to the combination of technologies, specialists can detect information otherwise invisible to the human eye, which is fundamental for the early diagnosis of oncological diseases. Data provided by the American Cancer Center note that the rate of breast cancer that is not diagnosed through standard examinations reaches 20%: a percentage that can be drastically reduced with the help of Artificial Intelligence, which allows the detection of false positives in advance.

Artificial Intelligence and COVID-19

Even the fight against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, can benefit from the use of new technologies. 

“At Humanitas, an algorithm is being developed to speed up the diagnostic pathway of patients thanks to Artificial Intelligence. This software, through computed tomography, will make it possible to immediately identify who needs to be admitted to the ICU,” Savevski concludes.