1.

INTRODUCTION

The goal of this capstone project is to shed more light on a trending topic that not only affects

healthcare but basically almost all facets of life. The world of information technology is rapidly

developing and the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is raising a lot of questions that

even highly rated scientists do not have answers to at the moment. They do not totally

understand how much can be accomplished with AI but however, there is no doubt that this

powerful tool will have a great impact on the world in coming years.

Through out the history of man on this planet, we see that there have been landmark discoveries

that changed the world, from little discoveries like using stones to create fire to more significant

ones like using nuclear plants as a source of power. Today it is strongly believed that the

development of AI would lead to tremendous changes on the world as we know it to be now. We

believe that very soon all big tech companies will used AI for almost all areas of production and

decision making.

Today the use of AI can be seen in giant tech companies like Tesla and the world is already

wowed by some of the things they are accomplishing with AI but it is just a scratch on the

surface. Daily, numerous research and studies are being carried out on AI to see more ways they

can be applied to every activity of our lives. This paper will focus more on how it is being used

in health care today and the possible impact it can have on it in the future.
2. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) was first introduced in 1956 at a gathering at

Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (Brighton, 2015). Since then, various disciplines within

multiple areas such as computer science and even philosophy have been debating the definition

of AI. How can we determine if a machine, computer program or something else found in our

labs is an AI?

2.1 Definition of Artificial Intelligence

Before elucidating on what AI is, we would like take your mind back to the fundamental idea on

what intelligence is. Using animals a reference, intelligence is the ability of that animal to learn

from its environment, solve problems, interact with other members of it specie and retain

memory. These are learned behaviours unlike the instinctive ones like breathing, eating etc. We

can call simply call an animal intelligent when it is able to think and carry out activities it has

learned.

Let’s now relate this established idea of intelligence with AI. When man made machines, the did

so in order to make it easier for them to accomplish certain tasks. Since man is curious and

ambitious, they thought of ways to have machines than can think like them if not better and

that’s how man came to invent computers and programs to give machines intelligent behaviours

which are the abilities to learn and develop. That’s where the term ‘Machine Learning’ which is

the foundation of AI comes from.

machines, especially computer systems that can think and act like humans (Russell & Norvig,

2016). AI involves a variety of technologies including natural language processing, robotics,

machine learning, image recognition and speech recognition. AI has been used to develop

autonomous vehicles such as self-driving cars and robots that can interact with their environment

in more sophisticated ways than previous generations of technology.

In Henry Brighton's book Introducing Artificial Intelligence: A Graphic Guide (2015), he divides

AI into two forms: Strong AI, also known as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and Weak AI.

AGI is an intelligent machine capable of performing all tasks just like a normal human; however,

its existence is still uncertain with no one being able to determine when, how or even if it will

appear. On the other hand, Weak AI has a weaker form of intelligence in comparison to AGI and

can only solve certain problems or perform specific tasks similar to humans but not all.

The term Artificial Intelligence (AI) was first coined in 1956 by John McCarthy, a computer

scientist at Dartmouth College. He defined it as “the science and engineering of making

intelligent machines” during the now-famous Dartmouth Conference that he organized along

with Marvin Minsky, Nathan Rochester, and Claude Shannon. The conference focused on

exploring how computers can be used to simulate human thought processes and problem solving

capabilities (McCarthy et al., 1955). During this event, McCarthy proposed the use of AI for

games such as chess and checkers to demonstrate its effectiveness in simulating human behavior.
This was the beginning of research into developing algorithms that could enable machines to

think like humans do (Gardner & Rosenblatt, 1958).

Today we have several dictionary definitions of AI:

Merriam-Webster defines AI as “the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human

behaviour”.

Oxford English Dictionary: “the theory and development of computer systems able to

perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech

recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages”.

Cambridge Dictionary: “the study of how to produce machines that have some of the

qualities that the human mind has, such as the ability to understand language, recognize

pictures, solve problems and learn from experience”.