In 2021, a family friend experienced an unexpected health crisis. She was healthy and strong but suddenly found herself out of breath and weak. When my wife spoke to her on a Zoom call, she explained that she hadn’t been feeling well for two weeks and was struggling to brush her hair and care for her everyday needs. A few weeks later, she went into cardiac arrest. We were devastated by the news.
When things like this happen, we often wonder how we could have prevented them. AI technology will eventually have the potential to detect problems with the heart or body that human doctors might overlook. As AI progresses, it will be used more frequently to detect conditions that often go unnoticed until it’s too late.
AI is revolutionizing healthcare in incredible ways. While most people know how AI is used to diagnose diseases and manage hospital computer systems, a few lesser-known advancements deserve attention.
One example is in Denmark, where emergency services use an AI-powered dispatch to analyze 911 calls for signs of cardiac arrest. Denmark’s system is called “Corti,” it uses machine learning to recognize distress in a caller’s voice by listening to breathing patterns and picking up on specific words used by the caller. It’s working beautifully by leading to quicker medical intervention and saving lives.
With talk of bird flu in the air, AI can also help prevent pandemics before they happen. Canada uses an AI system called BlueDot to predict and mitigate outbreaks. The BlueDot system is so good that it was one of the first to identify the COVID-19 pandemic, well before the WHO issued a warning.
A final example is the incredible da Vinci Surgical System. This system will revolutionize surgery because it gives surgeons a view of the surgical area magnified 10 times what the human eye can see. Patients who use the system for removing gallstones have a success rate of up to 98 percent, as opposed to the traditional laparoscopic approach, which has an average success rate of less than 70 percent.
Imagine if there were a body scan that could quickly detect cancer cells or a technology that tapped into iridology and easily diagnosed patients by simply looking into their eyes. With AI tools like facial recognition and disease detection, we are closer than ever to having these tools as an everyday reality in the near future.