Eticas

How are algorithms and IA being applied in healthcare?

In recent years, AI has been widely applied in the medical sector. Do you want to know where and how it is applied?

The application of artificial intelligence in healthcare field provides extensive applications that help to support the system and the development of medical solutions.

It is used to search personalized treatments for each patient in order to reduce costs and increase their effectiveness. To achieve this, it works using anonymized data to simulate the response of the patient to different treatments. Algorithms are trained through this data to be able to find what kind of treatment works best for each type of patient according to their success in the data history. This technology is implemented in areas such as ​​oncology.

Machine learning is used to help doctors make diagnoses. It is widely applied, for example, when images are analyzed in order to detect or rule out pathologies such as breast or skin cancer. In this way, AI is used to facilitate routine tasks and the work of doctors, so that they can invest their time attending their patients in other aspects.

These technologies are also used in preventive medicine, to predict the risk of disease development and apply solutions before they definitely appear. In this case, one of the most common examples is the use against diabetes, where family history and lifestyle are decisive.

Optimization is one of the biggest advantages of AI and one of the reasons why it is widely used in hospitals. It is helpful for organizing occupation of beds, programming the use of ORs or anticipating the need for medical staff for instance. Historical data is used to make predictions based on the past so they can plan for whether at any time of the year occupancy is likely to be higher, in what area this is likely to happen or foresee how long will it take a patient to be admitted.

Last but not least, technology makes progress in clinical techniques and enables research development. In this sense, pharmaceutical companies use it to create new drugs and its application to discover correlations and effects between the chemical compounds of drugs and different diseases.

In all the described cases in which algorithms and AI are applied in the health field, it is essential to take into account that their application must be carried out in an ethical way. It will be essential to protect the data and privacy of patients, to know how accountable systems are and to ensure that there are no discriminatory biases in them.