Four major impacts of artificial intelligence on healthcare

Medical technology is on the brink of being revolutionized by artificial intelligence (AI). In nearly every area of patient care, from chronic diseases and cancer to radiography and risk assessment, the potential of AI to deliver more accurate, efficient, and effective therapies at precisely the appropriate time in a patient's care is almost limitless. As payment systems change, patients expect more from their providers, and the amount of accessible data continues to grow at an alarming...

2 November 2021 | Healthcare

UK health secretary hopes AI projects can tackle racial inequality

UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid has greenlit a series of AI-based projects that aim to tackle racial inequalities in the NHS.

Racial inequality continues to be rampant in healthcare. Examining the fallout of COVID-19 serves as yet another example of the disparity between ethnicities.

In England and Wales, males of Black African ethnic background had the highest rate of death involving COVID-19, 2.7 times higher than males of a White ethnic background. Females of Black...

20 October 2021 | Ethics & Society

DeepMind hit with class-action lawsuit over NHS health data scandal

DeepMind is facing a class-action lawsuit over its controversial use of NHS patients’ health data back in 2015.

Google-owned DeepMind was quietly given the personal records of 1.6 million patients at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust.

DeepMind said that it was using the data to create a potentially life-saving app called Streams. The app was designed to alert, diagnose, and detect when patients were at risk of developing acute kidney injury. It’s currently...

1 October 2021 | Ethics & Society

National Robotarium pioneers AI and telepresence robotic tech for remote health consultations

The National Robotarium, hosted by Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, has unveiled an AI-powered telepresence robotic solution for remote health consultations.

Using the solution, health practitioners would be able to assess a person’s physical and cognitive health from anywhere in the world. Patients could access specialists no matter whether they’re based in the UK, India, the US, or anywhere else.

Iain Stewart, UK Government Minister for Scotland,...

20 September 2021 | Healthcare

DeepMind releases AlphaFold database of nearly all human protein structures

British artificial intelligence giant DeepMind has released a database of nearly all human protein structures that it amassed as part of its AlphaFold program.

Last year, the organisers of the biennial Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP) recognised AlphaFold as a solution to the grand challenge of figuring out what shapes proteins fold into.

Professor John Moult, Co-founder and Chair of CASP, University of Maryland, said:

“We have been...

23 July 2021 | Healthcare

NVIDIA launches UK supercomputer to search for healthcare solutions

NVIDIA supercomputer

Nvidia’s ‘Cambridge-1’ is now operational and utilising AI and simulation to advance research in healthcare.

The UK’s most powerful supercomputer and among the world’s top fifty, Cambridge-1 was announced by the technology company in October last year and cost $100 million (£72m) to build.

Its first projects with AstraZeneca, GSK, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, King’s College London, and Oxford Nanopore Technologies include developing a...

12 July 2021 | Healthcare

MLCommons releases latest MLPerf Training benchmark results

Open engineering consortium MLCommons has released its latest MLPerf Training community benchmark results.

MLPerf Training is a full system benchmark that tests machine learning models, software, and hardware.

The results are split into two divisions: closed and open. Closed submissions are better for comparing like-for-like performance as they use the same reference model to ensure a level playing field. Open submissions, meanwhile, allow participants to submit a...

30 June 2021 | Google

How AI has helped in the transportation of vaccine delivery for COVID-19

While driverless trucks may once have seemed like a vision from far off in the future, rapid developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning have placed us on the brink of a new automation age, starting with how we transport goods. Although the logistics sector can sometimes fall behind other early-adopting industries, a 2017 McKinsey study showed that transportation companies using a proactive AI strategy had higher profit margins compared to those that did...

28 June 2021 | Healthcare

How AI technologies are being used to better understand retinal diseases

Retinal diseases are varied, in both their symptoms and severity. Left untreated, some diseases can cause severe vision loss, or even blindness. The importance of proactive treatment and prevention is vital; yet not everybody has that equal opportunity.

In third-world countries in particular, a critical issue is a lack of public access to specialised medical care. Even if the equipment is there, the expertise required to interpret test results and get the correct diagnosis and...

28 May 2021 | Healthcare

Microsoft considers acquiring Siri creator Nuance for $16 billion

Microsoft is considering acquiring Siri creator Nuance for $16 billion in a deal that’s expected to be announced imminently.

Silicon Valley darling Nuance is one of the world’s most recognisable AI companies for the creation of Siri, the voice assistant that would later go on to become Apple’s first-party solution.

Nuance now focuses its efforts predominantly on enterprise communications, particularly in the healthcare space which has seen increased interest amid...

12 April 2021 | Enterprise