You’ve already heard that Artificial Intelligence or AI is ubiquitous. In fact, you may not be aware that you use it all the time. It’s being used by the digital assistants on your smartphone, it’s personalizing your Instagram feed, and those fun Snapchat Filters are also AI-powered. In a nutshell, AI has grown rapidly and is helping transform almost every industry you can think of.
Healthcare and medicine are one of the many sectors that are leveraging the benefits of this advanced technology. AI is used to better diagnose diseases and reduce error, as an efficient symptom checker, in fitness bands, as radiology assistants, and a lot more. Many different companies have also come up with AI-powered healthcare solutions to drive more innovation in the healthcare segment.
Qure.ai is one such healthcare AI firm that uses artificial intelligence to make healthcare more accessible and affordable. The brainchild of Prashant Warier and Pooja Rao, the firm combines deep learning expertise with clinical and scientific knowledge. Warier and Rao gave Mashable India further insights into the idea behind Qure.ai and how they’re using AI, as part of our series, made possible by Accenture, a leading global professional services company.
Qure.ai was founded in 2016 when the idea that machines can understand and analyze images really well appealed to the founders, Warier, and Rao. They decided to apply AI technology to healthcare, and it led to the company’s inception. They built a technology that’s capable of automated chest X-ray interpretation to help radiologists read X-rays in a faster and more accurate way. It can detect about 28 different abnormal findings on a chest X-ray, screen tuberculosis, separate normal from abnormal X-rays, and quantify the amount of lung infection (infected parts in the lung) - all of that, in under a minute! Since it’s capable of analyzing lung infection in a patient, it’s playing a particularly crucial role in response against the COVID-19 pandemic.
Qure.ai also has a product around the interpretation of head CT scans that can analyze where in the brain the abnormality exists and how severe it is. Rao explained that they trained their AI algorithms with over thousands of X-rays and CT scans to deliver better and more accurate results in the real world. And the accuracy of their AI algorithms is improving every day, where it’s now outperforming human radiologists at spotting abnormalities.
Apart from Qure.ai, AI has extended its reach to a wide array of different medical innovations. We’ve already seen the use of physical robots in hospitals that help deliver medications, clean floors, disinfect hospital equipment, and more. There are also surgical robots that help doctors with different complex procedures, offering more control and precision. AI is also being used for patient care and to carry out administrative tasks in the form of a chatbot, clinical documentation, and record management. Especially, in the current unprecedented scenario, AI has become a strong pillar of support in the healthcare industry, helping simplify the lives of doctors, patients, and healthcare administrators. It has helped with prediction, faster diagnosis, drug discovery, vaccine development, and more.
Even with so many widespread AI-powered applications across the world, we’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg and AI is bound to grow even more in the future. The AI health market is witnessing staggering growth. Growth in the AI health market is expected to reach $6.6 billion by 2021—which is a compound annual growth rate of 40 percent.
It’s safe to say that we’ve only just begun to witness the massive transformative powers that AI holds within.