Few areas now escape the influence of artificial intelligence (AI), and the health sector is one of the most benefited.
Long before COVID-19 disrupted our lives, AI was already very present in those countries where it has been given the opportunity to demonstrate its potential with applications to improve diagnoses, admission processes, internment and prioritization of patients. emergency rooms or the assignment of doctors and nurses on call .
The pandemic situation has only reinforced its role, and is in fact playing a key role in the creation of new drugs and vaccines. This is pointed out by Inmaculada Martínez, an expert scientist in AI and advisor since 2010 on this matter to the British Government and the European Parliament.
Until the arrival of a vaccine, this technology will continue to offer a wide range of solutions. “AI is helping in the diagnosis and analysis of why certain patients have manifested symptoms and others have not, or why some have developed immunity in the blood and others have not and may be exposed to suffer from COVID-19 again ,” he points out. Martinez.
Likewise, artificial intelligence is a valuable weapon when establishing the traceability of close contacts with those infected . In this regard, Martínez gives as an example tracking apps developed to monitor the contagion rate, as is the case with Radar COVID . “When a person is infected and their mobile terminal sends encrypted messages to other phones within a meter, it can be compared with how many other devices it has communicated, and what other parameters can help to understand whether there has been contagion or not. These super calculations and measurements are made by an AI system ”.
Considered by the experts a digital visionary, Martínez exposes in her presentations the effects of automation or human-machine collaboration. “ Robots are already used in precision surgical operations . For example, in cardiac ablations where small incisions are made in the muscle tissue of the heart to regulate arrhythmias ”, he points out. He also advances that “now we are talking about using this type of device in recovery rooms for patients with COVID-19, instead of human nurses who can become infected .”
Another great advantage of automation is that “radiologists and oncologists are not going to have to deduce with their fallible human eyes if there are cancer markers in a patient’s hematological results or in mammography tests,” says Martínez, who is also a professor. from Imperial College London. In this sense, the expert predicts that “in about ten years it will seem inadmissible to us that the diagnosis has been based solely on what a human doctor has calibrated in his head.”
The Radar COVID application –top– works with AI systems, increasingly integrated.
By Mario Ruiz.
