6 ways AI is transforming healthcare

With the generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the healthcare market expected to hit $2.7 billion this year - and reach close to $17 billion by 2034 - here are ways AI is already transforming healthcare.AI can interpret brain scansA new AI software is "twice as accurate" as professionals at examining the brain scans of stroke patients. Two UK universities trained the software on a dataset of 800 brain scans of stroke patients and then trialled it on 2,000 patients.The results were impressive. Alongside the AI model's accuracy, the software was also able to identify the timescale within which the stroke happened - crucial information for professionals.As Dr Paul Bentley, consultant neurologist, told the Health Tech Newspaper: “For the majority of strokes caused by a blood clot, if a patient is within 4.5 hours of the stroke happening, he or she is eligible for both medical and surgical treatments. Up to 6 hours, the patient is also eligible for surgical treatment, but after this time point, deciding whether these treatments might be beneficial becomes tricky, as more cases become irreversible. So it’s essential for doctors to know both the initial onset time, as well as whether a stroke could be reversed.”AI can spot more bone fractures than humans canSurprisingly, urgent care doctors miss broken bones in up to 10% of cases. What’s more, X-ray technicians are both in short supply and overloaded. So using AI to do the initial scan could potentially avoid both unnecessary X-rays and missed fractures. The UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) says the technology is safe, reliable and could reduce the need for follow-up appointments. But there are concerns around the fast rollout of AI in healthcare."It is important that people using these tools are properly trained in doing so, meaning they understand and know how to mitigate risks from technological limitations such as the possibility for wrong information being given," says dr Caroline Green of the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford. AI and ambulancesIn the UK, around 350,000 people are taken by ambulance to hospital each month. It’s down to paramedics to decide who does or doesn’t need to go, and always with an awareness of how few beds are available.A study in Yorkshire in the north of England found that in 80% of cases AI could correctly predict the patients that needed to be transferred to hospital. The AI model was trained on factors such as a patient’s mobility, pulse and blood oxygen levels and chest pain – it also proved to respond without bias. NICE did caution, however, that before being put into more widespread use, more training was needed.Detecting early signs of more than 1,000 diseasesA new AI machine learning model can detect the presence of certain diseases before the patient is even aware of any symptoms, according to its maker AstraZeneca.Using medical data from 500,000 people who are part of a UK health data repository, the machine could “predict with high confidence a disease diagnosis many years later”.Slavé Petrovski, who led the research, told Sky News: "For many of these diseases, by the time they manifest clinically and the individual goes to the doctor because of an ailment or visible observation, that is far down the line from when the disease process began.“We can pick up signatures in an individual that are highly predictive of developing diseases like Alzheimer's, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, kidney disease and many others," he said.Another UK study has found that an AI tool can successfully detect 64% of epilepsy brain lesions previously missed by radiologists. Trained on the MRI scans of over 1,100 adults and children globally, the AI tool was able to spot lesions more quickly than a doctor, but also discover tiny or obscured ones that had evaded the human eye."It's like finding one character on five pages of solid black text," lead researcher Dr Konrad Wagstyl told the BBC. "AI can find about two-thirds that doctors miss - but a third are still really difficult to find." Combining AI's findings with human oversight and expertise has the potential to speed up both diagnosis and cure, the researchers say.Clinical chatbots to guide healthcare decisionsDoctors must make informed, swift medical decisions: AI could potentially speed these up, but it could also provide unreliable or biased information. A US study found that standard large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini were unable to provide clinicians with sufficiently relevant or evidence-based answers to their medical questions. But ChatRWD, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system – which essentially combines LLMs with retrieval systems to improve output – produced useful answers to 58% of the questions (compared with 2%-10% for the LLMs).Digital interfaces are increasingly being rolled out to help triage patients, too. In an insight report from 2024, part of the World Economic Forum’s Digital Healthcare Transformation Initiative, a case study on digital patient platform Huma, revealed it could reduce readmission rates by 30%, time spent reviewing patients by up to 40% and “alleviated the workload of healthcare providers”. The report anticipates a future in which technologies like these could “dramatically transform the patient experience. People who are generally healthy can use self-monitoring devices to optimize their mental and physical health, while those with health issues will have access to a wide range of digital solutions”.AI for healthcare adminAdministrative tasks are both inevitable and time-consuming in the medical field. Using AI co-pilots could free up clinicians to focus more of their time on patients.Microsoft has recently announced its Dragon Copilot, an AI healthcare tool that can listen to, and create notes on, clinical consultations. And Google already has a suite of AI models specifically tailored to alleviate some of the administrative burdens in healthcare. In Germany, an AI platform called Elea has cut testing and diagnosis times from weeks to hours and its founders are determined to show that the technology "can be an ally, not an obstacle". Co-founder Dr Sebastian Casu told EU-Startups: "No one joins the healthcare sector to spend hours on admin".Of course, having an AI tool listening in and taking notes on your doctor's appointment will be a big mental leap for many. A recent study in the UK found that just 29% of people would trust AI to provide basic health advice (although over two-thirds are comfortable with the technology being used to free up professionals' time). Then there is the question of accuracy. A report last year found that OpenAI's Whisper, used by many hospitals to summarize patient meetings, was hallucinating some of the transcriptions.This is why regulation of AI tools is so vital. In the UK, AI-powered medical devices are strictly regulated by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. In the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last year examined the regulation of AI in healthcare and concluded that, while the FDA will “continue to play a central role in ensuring safe, effective, and trustworthy AI tools” it was also essential that “all involved entities attend to AI with the rigour this transformative technology merits”. - Source: World Economic ForumDid you know?HallucinatingA report last year found that OpenAI's Whisper, used by many hospitals to summarize patient meetings, was hallucinating some of the transcriptions.

6 ways AI is transforming healthcare

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Namibian Sun 2025-07-03

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6 ways AI is transforming healthcare

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Namibian Sun 2025-07-03

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