Artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare is the use of complex algorithms and

software to emulate human cognition in the analysis of complicated medical data.

Specifically, AI is the ability for computer algorithms to approximate conclusions
without direct human input.
What distinguishes AI technology from traditional technologies in health care is the
ability to gain information, process it and give a well-defined output to the end-
user. AI does this through machine learning algorithms.
The primary aim of health-related AI applications is to analyze relationships
between prevention or treatment techniques and patient outcomes.
AI programs have been developed and applied to practices such as diagnosis
processes, treatment protocol development, drug development, personalized
medicine, and patient monitoring and care.
Medical institutions such as The Mayo Clinic, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer
Center, and National Health Service, have developed AI algorithms for their
departments. Large technology companies such as IBM and Google, and startups
such as Welltok and Ayasdi, have also developed AI algorithms for healthcare.
Machine Learning has made great advances in pharma and biotech efficiency. This
presentation summarizes the top 4 applications of AI in medicine today:
1. Diagnose diseases
Correctly diagnosing diseases takes years of medical training. Even then,
diagnostics is often an time-consuming process. In many fields, the demand for
experts far exceeds the available supply. This puts doctors under strain and often
delays life-saving patient diagnostics.
Machine Learning have recently made huge advances in automatically diagnosing
diseases, making diagnostics cheaper and more accessible.
Machine Learning algorithms can learn to see patterns similarly to the way doctors
see them. A key difference is that algorithms need a lot of concrete examples –
many thousands – in order to learn. And these examples need to be neatly digitized
– machines can’t read between the lines in textbooks.
So Machine Learning is particularly helpful in areas where the diagnostic
information a doctor examines is already digitized.
Such as:
 Detecting lung cancer or strokes based on
 Assessing the risk of sudden cardiac death or other heart diseases based on
electrocardiograms and cardiac MRI images
 Classifying skin lesions in skin images
 Finding indicators of diabetic retinopathy in eye images
Since there is plenty of good data available in these cases, algorithms are becoming
just as good at diagnostics as the experts. The difference is: the algorithm can
draw conclusions in a fraction of a second, and it can be reproduced
inexpensively all over the world. Soon everyone, everywhere could have access to
the same quality of top expert in radiology diagnostics, and for a low price.
AI won’t replace doctors anytime soon
It’s unlikely that AI will replace doctors outright. Instead, AI systems will be used
to highlight potentially malignant lesions or dangerous cardiac patterns for the
expert – allowing the doctor to focus on the interpretation of those signals.
2. Develop drugs faster
Developing drugs is a extremely expensive process. Many of the analytical
processes involved in drug development can be made more efficient with Machine
Learning. This has the potential to shave off years of work and hundreds of
millions in investments.
AI has already been used successfully in all of the 4 main stages in drug
development:
 Stage 1: Identifying targets for intervention
 Stage 2: Discovering drug candidates
 Stage 3: Speeding up clinical trials
 Stage 4: Finding Biomarkers for diagnosing the disease
Stage 1: Identify targets for intervention
The first step in drug development is understanding the biological origin of a
disease (pathways) as well as its resistance mechanisms. Then you have to identify
good targets (typically proteins) for treating the disease.
Machine Learning algorithms can more easily analyse all the available data and can
even learn to automatically identify good target proteins.
Stage 2: Discover drug candidates
Next, you need to find a compound that can interact with the identified target
molecule in the desired way. This involves screening a large number of potential
compounds for their effect on the target. These compounds could be natural,
synthetic, or bioengineered.
However, current software is often inaccurate and produces a lot of bad suggestions
(false positives) – so it takes a very long time to narrow it down to the best drug
candidates
Machine Learning algorithms can also help here: They can learn to predict the
suitability of a molecule based on structural fingerprints and molecular descriptors.
Then they blaze through millions of potential molecules and filter them all down to
the best options – those that also have minimal side effects. This ends up saving a
lot of time in drug design.
Stage 3: Speed up clinical trials
Machine Learning can speed up the design of clinical trials by automatically
identifying suitable candidates as well as ensuring the correct distribution for
groups of trial participants. Algorithms can help identify patterns that separate good
candidates from bad.
Stage 4: Find Biomarkers for diagnosing the disease
You can only treat patients for a disease once you’re sure of your diagnosis. Some
methods are very expensive and involve complicated lab equipment as well as
expert knowledge – such as whole genome sequencing.
Biomarkers are molecules found in bodily fluids (typically human blood) that
provide absolute certainty as to whether or not a patient has a disease. They
make the process of diagnosing a disease secure and cheap.
Biomarkers can be used to identify:
 The presence of a disease as early as possible - diagnostic biomarker
 The risk of a patient developing the disease - risk biomarker
 The likely progress of a disease - prognostic biomarker
 Whether a patient will respond to a drug - predictive biomarker
3. Personalize treatment
Different patients respond to drugs and treatment schedules differently. So
personalized treatment has enormous potential. But it’s very hard to identify which
factors should affect the choice of treatment.
Machine Learning can automate this complicated statistical work – and help
discover which characteristics indicate that a patient will have a particular
response to a particular treatment. So the algorithm can predict a patient’s
probable response to a particular treatment.
The system learns this by cross-referencing similar patients and comparing their
treatments and outcomes. The resulting outcome predictions make it much easier
for doctors to design the right treatment plan.
4. Improve gene editing
Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR), specifically
the CRISPR-Cas9 system for gene editing, is a big leap forward in our ability to
edit DNA cost effectively – and precisely, like a surgeon.
This technique relies on short guide RNAs to target and edit a specific location on
the DNA. But the guide RNA can fit multiple DNA locations – and that can lead to
unintended side effects (off-target effects). The careful selection of guide RNA
with the least dangerous side effects is a major bottleneck in the application of the
CRISPR system.
Machine Learning models have been proven to produce the best results when it
comes to predicting the degree of both guide-target interactions and off-target
effects for a given sgRNA. This can significantly speed up the development of
guide RNA for every region of human DNA.
Summary
AI is already helping us more efficiently diagnose diseases, develop drugs,
personalize treatments, and even edit genes.
But this is just the beginning. The more we digitize and unify our medical data,
the more we can use AI to help us find valuable patterns – patterns we can use to
make accurate, cost-effective decisions in complex analytical processes.
Top Recent AI Startups in The Medical Field
Ada. This is a service that allows you to directly communicate with a person and
give him your recommendations. The medical application communicates with the
patient, asks about symptoms and complaints, and in response gives
recommendations, including which doctor to visit, offers to contact a specialist for a
remote consultation.

Lunit. About 20% of lung cancer and breast cancer go unnoticed in the diagnosis.
Lunit is developing deep learning and 3D visualization software to help detect
difficult-to-diagnose diseases such as airway cancer. Its use increases the
probability of detecting cancer to 83–86%. Over time, the technology will improve
and accuracy will become even higher.
Sense.ly. This program monitors the condition of people who have recently
undergone long-term treatment or suffer from chronic diseases. The application was
created in order to structure data on the state of a person, it sends them to a
specialist and gives recommendations. Also, the system is able to remind about the
time of taking medications and when there is a need to visit a doctor.
Aira (San Diego) helps blind and visually impaired people “see” the world by
combining the capabilities of the human body and the capabilities of artificial
intelligence in an application or smart glasses. The company claims that their AI
development, Chloe, is still at the initial level of its capabilities: it can perform
simple tasks like reading instructions on a medicine package, but the developers
have big ambitions for its further development.
One of the company’s goals is to make navigation possible with computer vision.