Lately, Artificial Intelligence has been in the news for all the wrong reasons: from chatbots inventing a new language to AI replacing jobs. One firm in the US is trying to use AI in healthcare
Human Diagnosis Project
The Human Diagnosis Project (also called “Human Dx”) has attempted to build an online system that maps the best steps to help any patient. Primary care doctors can use this system to get help from the specialists
The Human Dx is a digital braintrust of more than 6,000 doctors, with expert insights neatly collected, curated, and delivered back to the doctors through an artificial intelligence platform, writes Megan Molteni in The Wired
Enter a query, get diagnosed
In the US, most of America’s needy citizens cannot follow up through on a specialist referral for various reasons. This is where Human Dx steps in. A doctor feeds the details of the patient, symptoms and photographs into the system. Within a few hours, specialists weigh in and within a few days, they confirm the diagnosis.
Future of healthcare
But like every AI system, Human Dx and other similar models have another, ‘potentially dangerous’ side. Alice Chen, the chief medical officer for the San Francisco Health Network told the Wired that he was worried Human Dx might create a system where some people might get to see specialists and some just get computerised opinions
How does it work?
It’s machine learning algorithms comb through all the specialist responses to check them against the project’s previously stored case reports, Molteni adds. Using this, the network will weigh each specialists’ finding and then combine it with others to arrive at a single conclusion. And with every solved case, the network gets a little smarter