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A senior citizen grew accustomed to receiving Aida's regular check-in each morning.

A routine morning call from an AI voice bot was not part of the service Rolls envisioned when she enrolled for the home care but when they asked to be part of the trial several months back, the elderly lady said yes because she wished to contribute. Although, to be honest, her expectations weren't high.

Even so, when the call came through, she says: “I was so overtaken by how interactive she was. It was remarkable for a machine.”

“She’d always ask ‘how are you feeling today?’ and that provides a chance if you feel unwell to say you felt sick, or I might reply ‘I’m fine, thank you’.”

“She would go on to ask follow-up questions – ‘did you manage to go outdoors today?’”

Aida would also ask what Rolls had planned for the day and “it would reply appropriately.”

“When I mentioned I plan to go shopping, it would ask nice shopping or food shopping? I found it entertaining.”

AI Reducing the Workload on Healthcare Staff

This pilot, which has now wrapped up its initial stage, is an example in which advances in AI technology are being taken up in the medical field.

Health tech firm the provider partnered with St Vincent’s regarding the trial to use its generative AI technology to offer companionship, along with an option for elderly recipients to report any medical concerns or concerns for a caregiver to follow up.

Dean Jones, head of the home care division, says the service under evaluation is not a substitute for any in-person visits.

“Recipients still receive a regular personal visit, but between these meetings … the automated system allows a routine call, which can then escalate any potential concerns to either our team or a client’s family,” the director notes.

The managing director, the managing director of the company, reports there have been no any negative events noted from the St Vincent’s trial.

The company uses advanced AI “with strict safety protocols” to ensure the conversation is secure and procedures are established to respond to serious health issues quickly, the director says. As an instance, if a client is experiencing chest pains, it would be alerted to the medical staff and the call terminated so the person could call emergency services.

Campbell believes artificial intelligence has an important role amid staffing shortages across the healthcare sector.

“The benefit securely, using such systems, is lessen the admin burden on the workforce so qualified health professionals can focus on doing the job that they’re trained to do,” she says.

Artificial Intelligence Long Established as Often Believed

Prof Enrico Coiera, the co-founder of the national AI health alliance, explains older forms of AI have been a standard part of medicine for a considerable period, often in “administrative functions” such as analyzing scans, cardiograms and lab reports.

“Software that performs a function that involves decision making in some way is AI, regardless of how it achieves that,” states the professor, who is additionally the director of the health informatics center at Macquarie University.

“When visiting the imaging department, medical imaging center or diagnostic laboratory, you’ll see software in equipment performing these tasks.”

In recent years, advanced versions of AI called “deep learning” – an algorithmic approach that allows algorithms to learn from extensive datasets – have been employed to read diagnostic scans and improve diagnosis, the expert notes.

Recently, BreastScreen NSW became the nation's first population-based screening program to introduce AI analysis tools to assist specialists in reviewing a specific set of breast scans.

These represent specialized tools that continue to need a specialist doctor to interpret the findings they might suggest, and the accountability for a clinical judgment sits with the healthcare provider, the professor emphasizes.

AI’s Role in Early Disease Detection

The Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne has been collaborating with researchers from a UK university who pioneered AI methods to identify neurological lesions known as specific brain malformations from brain scans.

These abnormalities trigger seizures that crequently are resistant with medication, so surgical intervention to remove them becomes the sole option. However, the procedure can only be performed if the surgeons can locate the abnormal tissue.

In research published this week in the journal Epilepsia, a team from the research body, led by neurologist Emma Macdonald-Laurs, showed their “AI epilepsy detective” could identify the lesions in nearly all of instances from advanced imaging in a subtype of the lesions that have historically been missed in more than half of cases (sixty percent).

The AI was developed using the scans of a group of individuals and then evaluated with pediatric cases and 12 adults. Among the youngsters, twelve underwent operations and 11 are now seizure free.

The tool employs AI algorithms similar to the breast cancer screening – highlighting suspicious areas, which are still checked by specialists “speeding up the process to reach a conclusion,” Macdonald-Laurs says.

She emphasises the researchers are currently in initial stages of the work, with a additional research necessary to advance the tool heading towards clinical implementation.

A leading neurologist, a neurologist who was not involved in the study, notes MRI scans now produce such vast quantities of high-resolution data that it is challenging for a person to go through it accurately. So for doctors the difficulty of finding these lesions was like “identifying the needle in the haystack.”

“This illustrates of how AI can support clinicians in making quicker, more accurate diagnoses, and has the potential to improve operation opportunities and outcomes for kids with otherwise intractable epilepsy,” Cook says.

Illness Identification in the Future

A public health expert, the vice-president of the European Public Health Association’s AI health division, says deep neural networks are also helping to monitor and predict epidemics.

Buttigieg, who presented recently at the Public Health of Australia’s conference in Wollongong, cited Blue Dot, a company established by medical experts and which was an early detector to detect the coronavirus pandemic.

Generative AI is a further subset of deep learning, in which the system can generate new content using training data. Such applications in medicine include programs such as Healthily’s AI voice bot along with the automated note-takers doctors and allied health professionals are adopting more.

Dr Michael Wright, the head of the national GP body, says GPs have been embracing AI scribes, which captures the consultation and turns into a consultation note that can be included in the health file.

Wright states the main benefit of the scribes is that it improves the quality of the interaction between the doctor and patient.

A medical leader, the chair of the Australian Medical Association, agrees that scribes are helping doctors manage schedules and adds AI also has the potential to help doctors avoid repeated examinations and scans for their patients, if the {promised digitisation|planned digitalization