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Peta Rolls came to anticipate receiving Aida's regular call at 10am.

A daily check-in call from an AI voice bot was not part of the care package Rolls expected when she enrolled for the in-home support however when they asked to be part of the pilot program four months ago, the 79-year-old agreed because she wanted to help. Although, truth be told, her hopes weren't high.

Even so, when she got the call, she states: “I was amazed by how responsive the AI was. It was remarkable for a machine.”

“She’d always ask ‘how are you feeling today?’ and that provides a chance if you’re feeling sick to mention your symptoms, or I just say ‘I’m fine, thank you’.”

“She would go on to ask follow-up questions – ‘have you had a chance to step outside today?’”

The virtual assistant would also ask what the user had planned for the day and “it would reply appropriately.”

“If I would say I’m going shopping, it would ask are you shopping for clothes or groceries? It was quite engaging.”

Bots Easing the Administrative Burden on Medical Professionals

The trial, which has now wrapped up its first phase, is an example in which advances in artificial intelligence are being taken up in healthcare.

Digital health company the provider partnered with St Vincent’s about the program to utilize its advanced AI system to offer companionship, as well as an opportunity for elderly recipients to log any medical concerns or concerns for a staff member to follow up.

Dean Jones, national director of the home care division, says the service being trialled does not replace any face to face interactions.

“Clients continue to get a weekly face to face meeting, but between these meetings … the automated system enables a routine call, which can then escalate any potential concerns to either our team or a client’s family,” Jones says.

Dr Tina Campbell, the CEO of Healthily, says there have been no any negative events noted from the pilot program.

The company uses open AI “with very clear guardrails and prompts” to guarantee the interaction is secure and mechanisms are established to respond to serious health issues quickly, the director states. As an instance, if a client is experiencing chest pains, it would be flagged to the medical staff and the conversation terminated so the individual could dial triple zero.

Campbell thinks artificial intelligence has an important role given staffing shortages across the healthcare sector.

“What we can do securely, using such systems, is lessen the admin burden on the staff so qualified health professionals can focus on performing the duties that they’re trained to do,” she comments.

Artificial Intelligence Long Established as You Might Think

Prof Enrico Coiera, the founder of the national AI health alliance, says older forms of artificial intelligence have been a standard part of healthcare for a long time, often in “back office services” such as interpreting scans, cardiograms and pathology test results.

“Software that performs a task that involves decision making in certain aspects is artificial intelligence, regardless of how it accomplishes it,” says Coiera, who is also the head of the health informatics center at a leading university.

“When visiting the radiology unit, medical imaging center or pathology lab, you will find software in equipment performing these tasks.”

In recent years, advanced versions of AI known as “deep learning” – a neural network method that enables algorithms to learn from very large sets of data – have been used to read diagnostic scans and improve diagnosis, Coiera notes.

In November, a screening service became Australia’s first public health initiative to adopt AI analysis tools to assist specialists in reviewing a specific set of mammography images.

These represent specialized tools that still require a qualified physician to evaluate the diagnosis they might suggest, and the responsibility for a clinical judgment rests with the medical practitioner, Coiera emphasizes.

AI’s Role in Early Disease Detection

A research center in Melbourne has been working alongside researchers from UCL London who pioneered artificial intelligence techniques to detect neurological lesions called focal cortical dysplasias from MRI images.

These lesions cause epileptic episodes that often cannot be controlled with drugs, meaning surgical intervention to excise the tissue becomes the only treatment available. However, the surgery can only be performed if the surgeons can locate the abnormal tissue.

A study recently released in the journal Epilepsia, a team from the institute, headed by specialist Emma Macdonald-Laurs, demonstrated their “neural network tool” could identify the abnormalities in up to 94% of instances from advanced imaging in a specific form of the lesions that have traditionally been missed in the majority of patients (sixty percent).

The AI was trained on the scans of 54 patients and then tested on 17 children and 12 adults. Among the youngsters, 12 had surgery and eleven became free of seizures.

This technology uses AI algorithms comparable with the breast cancer screening – highlighting regions of abnormality, which are subsequently reviewed by experts “speeding up the process to reach a conclusion,” Macdonald-Laurs says.

She stresses the researchers are currently in initial stages of the work, with a additional research necessary to advance the tool toward real-world use.

Prof Mark Cook, a brain specialist who was not involved in the study, says MRI scans now generate such huge amounts of high-resolution data that it is hard for a person to review it thoroughly. So for doctors the challenge of finding these abnormalities was like “searching for a needle in a haystack.”

“This illustrates of how AI can support clinicians in making quicker, precise identifications, and has the ability to enhance operation opportunities and outcomes for children with treatment-resistant seizures,” the professor says.

Disease Detection in the Years Ahead

A public health expert, the vice-president of the European Public Health Association’s digital health and artificial intelligence section, explains deep neural networks are also helping to track and forecast disease outbreaks.

Buttigieg, who spoke recently at the national health summit in the city, cited a tech firm, a company established by infectious disease specialists and which was an early detector to detect the Covid-19 outbreak.

Generative AI is a further subset of machine learning, in which the system can generate new content using existing information. These uses in healthcare include tools such as the virtual assistant along with the automated note-takers clinicians are increasingly using.

Dr Michael Wright, the president of the national GP body, says family doctors have been embracing AI scribes, which records the consultation and converts it to a consultation note that can be included in the health file.

Wright says the main benefit of the tools is that it improves the quality of the communication between the physician and individual.

Dr Danielle McMullen, the chair of the national doctors' group, agrees that AI note-takers are helping doctors optimise their time and adds AI can also help to prevent repeated examinations and scans for their patients, if the {promised digitisation|planned digitalization