Using AI to Efficiently Diagnose and Reduce Medical Errors

All healthcare professionals work hard to provide the best patient care possible, but misdiagnoses and errors will always occur simply because we are all human. In fact, a recent study by Johns Hopkins University found that at least 250,000 people in the US die each year due to medical errors. Another study claims that this number could be as high as 440,000. AI-powered technology is coming to the assistance of doctors and patients to help lower these numbers. Let’s take a look at some of the AI innovations in the field of healthcare that assist doctors to provide more accurate diagnoses and save patient lives.

Highly Accurate Cancer Diagnosis

Diagnosing cancer is troublesome simply because it is very difficult to spot. Furthermore, there are so many factors that must be taken into consideration. For example, some forms of cancer are very rare and could be easily overlooked as something insignificant. Also, not a lot of resources and attention might be given to diagnose and treat them. Keep in mind, this is just one possible complication. Researchers in Cambridge, Massachusetts have created a new product called PathAI that is coming to the assistance of pathologists and helping them diagnose cancer in patients. Some of the biggest names in the healthcare industry and charitable organizations are supporting this new development. These companies include LabCorp and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

A Smart Symptoms Checker

Sometimes we all have a cough or a runny nose and we tend to dismiss such symptoms as the common cold. However, they could be a sign of a more serious illness. Researchers in Boston, Massachusetts have developed an AI-powered symptom checker, Buoy Health, that asks patients questions about what they are experiencing and provides them with diagnosing and, if possible, helping them recover as well. There are more than 30,000 possible questions the chatbot can ask people, but after about 25, the user is given three possible diagnoses and how to treat each of them. This is a product that can be particularly useful during the current health crisis since people are always worried about COVID-19 symptoms.

Using AI for Actionable Insights

Providing the right diagnosis is very important, but it’s only the first step towards the cure. Doctors need to be able to offer  patients the right course of action to help treat their illnesses. A company in San Francisco, CA, Enlitic, has developed technology to help streamline radiology diagnosis. They are using machine learning to analyze all kinds of unstructured data such as radiological images, blood tests, EKGs, and many other sources of data to give doctors deeper insights into the patient’s need so that they could be given the necessary recovery plan. This technology has really caused a lot of headway in the medical community and beyond. In fact, MIT has included Enlitic in its top 5 rankings of the smartest AI companies in the world ahead of companies like Facebook and Microsoft.

Treating Blood Disease Faster

There are lots of different bacteria that can lead to blood diseases such as E. coli and staphylococcus. Doctors need to be able to analyze patient blood samples and identify blood disease if it exists, and all of the harmful substances located on the blood as well. Currently, doctors are manually analyzing the tests and trying to provide a diagnosis, however, new technology out of Boston, MA is allowing them to expedite the process. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is using AI to scan the images and identify blood disease if it is present. They used 25,000 different blood test images to train the machines and now they are able to diagnose patients with a 95% accuracy rate. In addition to the speed, the new technology is able to identify blood disease at much earlier stages than was previously possible, open the door for life-saving treatments before the disease progresses, and increase the survival rate.

Mindy Support is Assisting the development of New Technology

All of the technologies that we talked about require humans to annotate data to help train the technology to provide more accurate diagnoses. As you can imagine, this is very time-consuming work and doctors and researchers simply do not have time for such low-level tasks. Mindy Support provides comprehensive data annotation services to companies and medical organizations looking to develop cutting edge AI products. We have a long track record of successfully actualizing medical data annotation projects and we can assemble even the most sizable team to fit your needs. You will always have control over the size of your team and can scale up or down whenever you like.

We work with MRIs, CT scans, PET scans, X-rays and Mammograms and have successfully actualized data annotation projects with these images. We have annotated thousands of images within the predetermined time period and we were able to find and recruit qualified personnel to do the annotations. For more detailed information on the results we were able to deliver, please browse through our case studies.