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Peta Rolls came to anticipate getting the AI's regular call each morning.

A daily check-in call from an AI voice bot wasn't initially included in the service Rolls envisioned when she signed up for St Vincent’s home care however when they asked to participate in the trial several months back, the elderly lady said yes because she wanted to help. Although, truth be told, her hopes weren't high.

Even so, when she got the call, she says: “I was so overtaken by how interactive she was. It was remarkable for a machine.”

“She’d always ask ‘how you are today?’ and that gives you an opportunity if you’re feeling sick to mention your symptoms, or I just say ‘I'm well, thanks’.”

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

Aida would also inquire about what Rolls was planning for the day and “it would reply appropriately.”

“When I mentioned I plan to go shopping, it would ask nice shopping or food shopping? It was quite engaging.”

AI Reducing the Administrative Burden on Medical Professionals

The trial, which has recently concluded its initial stage, is one of the ways in which advances in artificial intelligence are being taken up in healthcare.

Digital health company Healthily approached St Vincent’s about the trial to use its generative AI technology to offer companionship, along with an opportunity for elderly recipients to report any health issues or concerns for a caregiver to address.

Dean Jones, head of the home care division, explains the service being trialled does not replace any face to face interactions.

“Clients still receive a weekly face to face meeting, but between these meetings … the [AI] system enables a daily check-in, which can then escalate any potential concerns to care staff or a client’s family,” the director notes.

Dr Tina Campbell, the CEO of the company, reports there haven’t been any adverse incidents reported from the St Vincent’s trial.

Healthily employs advanced AI “with strict safety protocols” to guarantee the interaction is safe and mechanisms are established to address serious health issues promptly, the director says. For example, if a patient is reporting heart symptoms, it would be flagged to the care team and the call terminated so the individual could call emergency services.

Campbell believes artificial intelligence has an important role given significant workforce challenges throughout the medical industry.

“The benefit securely, with technology like this, is reduce the administrative load on the staff so qualified health professionals can concentrate on performing the duties that they’re trained to do,” she says.

Artificial Intelligence Long Established as Often Believed

Prof Enrico Coiera, the co-founder of the national AI health alliance, says older forms of artificial intelligence have been a common feature of healthcare for a considerable period, frequently in “administrative functions” such as interpreting medical images, cardiograms and lab reports.

“Any computer program that performs a function that requires judgment in certain aspects is AI, regardless of how it achieves that,” states Coiera, who is also the director of the Centre for Health Informatics at a leading university.

“When visiting the radiology unit, medical imaging center or diagnostic laboratory, you’ll see software in machines doing just that.”

In recent years, advanced versions of AI known as “machine learning” – a neural network method that allows systems to learn from very large sets of data – have been employed to interpret medical imaging and improve diagnosis, Coiera notes.

In November, a screening service became the nation's first public health initiative to introduce AI analysis tools to assist radiologists in reviewing a select range of mammography images.

These represent advanced systems that continue to need a specialist doctor to evaluate the findings they might suggest, and the responsibility for a medical decision rests with the healthcare provider, Coiera says.

The Function of AI in Identifying Illness Early

The Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne has been collaborating with scientists from a UK university who first developed AI methods to detect neurological lesions known as focal cortical dysplasias from MRI images.

These lesions trigger seizures that crequently cannot be controlled with drugs, meaning surgery to excise the tissue becomes the sole option. However, the procedure can proceed if the doctors can pinpoint the abnormal tissue.

In research recently released in the journal Epilepsia, a group from the institute, led by neurologist Emma Macdonald-Laurs, showed their “AI epilepsy detective” could detect the lesions in up to 94% of instances from advanced imaging in a specific form of the lesions that have historically been missed in the majority of cases (60%).

The AI was developed using the scans of 54 patients and then evaluated with pediatric cases and adult patients. Of the 17 children, 12 had surgery and eleven became free of seizures.

This technology employs neural network classifiers comparable with the breast cancer screening – highlighting suspicious areas, which are still checked by experts “but it makes it a lot quicker to reach a conclusion,” the researcher explains.

She emphasises the team are still in the “early phases” of the work, with a additional research required to advance the tool heading towards clinical implementation.

Prof Mark Cook, a neurologist who was independent from the research, says MRI scans now generate such vast quantities of detailed information that it is hard for a human to review it thoroughly. So for doctors the difficulty of finding these lesions was like “identifying the needle in the haystack.”

“This illustrates of how AI can assist doctors in making quicker, precise identifications, and has the ability to enhance surgical access and outcomes for children with otherwise intractable epilepsy,” Cook comments.

Illness Identification in the Future

Dr Stefan Buttigieg, the vice-president of the international body's digital health and artificial intelligence section, says advanced AI systems are additionally used to track and forecast epidemics.

The expert, who presented recently at the national health summit in the city, gave as an example Blue Dot, a organization established by medical experts and which was an early detector to identify the Covid-19 outbreak.

Content-creating AI is a further subset of deep learning, in which the system can generate new content using training data. These uses in healthcare include programs such as the virtual assistant as well as the AI scribes clinicians are increasingly using.

A GP representative, the head of the Royal Australian College of GPs, reports family doctors have been adopting AI scribes, which records the appointment and turns into a medical summary that can be added to the health file.

Wright states the primary advantage of the tools is that it improves the quality of the interaction between the doctor and patient.

A medical leader, the chair of the national doctors' group, concurs that AI note-takers are assisting physicians manage schedules and adds AI also has the potential to prevent repeated examinations and scans for their clients, if the {promised digitisation|planned digitalization