Machine learning is the new key to healthcare – Gadget

As healthcare professionals are facing massive pressure notonly to ensure the quality of care, but also to come up with new solutions,cures and treatments, they are becoming increasingly dependent on advancedtechnologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

But it is hardly a smooth partnership. The issues of skills shortages at the entry-level and of messy data in leveraging patient records at the high end are merely book-ends for a range of challenges that span these fields.

Last weeks annual Amazon Web Services Re:Invent conference,one of the largest cloud-focused events in the world, saw the launch ordemonstration of a range of new cloud-based tools that are ideal for healthresearch and treatment. ML, defined as computer algorithms that improveautomatically through experience, was at the heart of these.

The tools raised two key questions in terms of global andlocal relevance, namely how messy data is addressed, and how relevant these areto South Africa.

We asked a man at the heart of AWSs health initiatives, ShezPartovi, AWS director of worldwide business development for healthcare, lifesciences, and genomics. It all starts with ML, he says.

In South Africa, we have seen how providing access toadvanced technologies such as ML is vital to stopping the spread of COVID-19and helping individuals quickly find medical help when they fall ill. GovChat,South Africas largest citizen engagement platform, launched a COVID-19 chatbotin less than two weeks using Amazon Lex, an AI service for building conversationalinterfaces into any application using voice and text.

The chatbot provides health advice and recommendations onwhether to get a test for COVID-19, information on the nearest COVID-19 testingfacility, the ability to receive test results, and the option for citizens toreport COVID-19 symptoms for themselves, their family, or household members.

ML in particular is being roped in globally to address themassive volumes of data being gathered from a variety of unrelated sources, hesays.

ML has the potential to serve as an assistive tool forhealthcare professionals, providing the support they need to process and analysethe increasing amount of data generated by doctors, hospitals, researchers, andorganisations, including structured data like Electronic Health Record forms,as well as unstructured data, such as emails, text documents, and even voicenotes.

ML is being used in a variety of tasks such as analysing medical images to advancing precision medicine. Tools that leverage natural language processing, pattern recognition, and risk identification are also fuelling new models for predictive, preventive, and population health and have the potential to help providers identify gaps in care and improve the health of individuals and communities.

Go to the next page to read about how Amazons latest machine learning tools can read a doctors handwriting.

Read more from the original source:
Machine learning is the new key to healthcare - Gadget