The driving force behind Artificial Intelligence (AI) is its potential to accelerate human progress and enhance our experiences in all areas of our lives, and in no area is this more significant than healthcare.
The healthcare sector has seen unbelievable progress in the last decade, including the rapid, cross-border innovation that saw us through the pandemic. However, factors including increased population density, rising healthcare costs, and pressures on the NHS mean that we continue to face increased challenges to our health. With heightened patient expectations and intense pressure on medical staff and providers, AI and HPC can help ease the strain by improving patient care, eliminating manual tasks, and delivering better outcomes.
Fortunately, we are well-positioned to meet these challenges facing healthcare in the UK today. The UK Government has pledged to leverage AI solutions across hospitals to facilitate diagnoses and admission for treatment. Advances in genomics, bioinformatics, microscopy, medical imaging, and many other areas have created a data avalanche. If captured and analysed correctly, this data can significantly improve patient outcomes through AI. Take AI and analytics-driven workspaces, which allow medics to optimise productivity, foster collaboration, and enhance decision-making, boosting clinical and research results.
Advanced computing technologies, like AI algorithms running on high-performance computing (HPC) systems, are key to unlocking the true value of medical data, which will ultimately save lives and improve overall health.
Making care even more personal
Data has become a key asset for healthcare organisations, and data pools will continue to grow. For specialised areas of care, such as precision medicine that leverages genomic research, HPC architectures can enable faster, more agile management of large volumes of genetic patient data. By leveraging these data pools and extracting actionable insights, healthcare organisations can transform care into life-changing personalised healthcare for patients and populations.
HPC is a crucial element in personalised healthcare, as it equips medical professionals with the ability to swiftly extract meaningful conclusions from vast and intricate data sets. HPC has significantly reduced the time required for genomic analysis, transforming what used to be a days-long process into one that can be completed within minutes. Whether it’s employing AI or machine learning (ML) to interpret medical imagery, identify trends across patient groups, engineer medical equipment, or tackle challenges, such as predicting protein structures, there’s an undeniable need to execute high-demand computational tasks at a rapid pace.
Medics can leverage AI in tandem with HPC to develop very tailored treatment plans by deciphering large amounts of data, uncovering new patterns, and pulling out insights that go beyond any human’s ability. It has the power to revolutionise patient care, to improve efficiency as well as deliver more predictive and accessible care. In the past, healthcare providers have depended on a one-size-fits-all approach that targets a specific illness rather than focusing on the particular needs of a patient. Revolutionary diagnostics can either prevent a condition at an early stage or allow much earlier diagnosis and treatment highly tailored to each individual.
Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems can potentially serve as a real-time source of insights since they may contain millions of confidential patient records spread across a non-centralised infrastructure. As the amount of data continues to expand, healthcare institutions have the opportunity to deliver more personalised care at reduced costs by embracing new systems designed to handle large and diverse data sources. HPC grants these healthcare organisations the necessary performance and efficiency to convert data into actionable knowledge almost instantaneously, thereby accelerating discoveries and enhancing patient care.
Personalisation does not just stop there – it could one day help us to predict the future. By analysing patients’ unique genomic make-ups, clinicians could come up with specific methods of prevention, diagnosis, and treatment, calculate an individual’s disease risk, and generate tailored reactive or even proactive drug therapies. Advancements in this field in the next decade could render personalised diagnostics based on a person’s genetic profile more attainable than ever before.
Today’s cutting-edge AI innovation
The medical world is already witnessing the transformative power of AI. For instance, Northwestern Medicine is harnessing the power of AI to alleviate physician burnout and drive medical breakthroughs. Facing challenges with cost and technological limitations, Northwestern Medicine generated a cutting-edge multimodal large language model capable of interpreting chest X-rays. This innovative model generates draft reports, streamlines the diagnostic process, and empowers physicians with valuable insights for enhanced decision-making.
What’s more, with the number of individuals diagnosed with cancer set to increase by a third in the UK, resulting in 506,000 new cases by 2038, AI is proving to be a game-changer in the field of cancer diagnosis and treatment. AI tools discover and identify tumors and lesions that may otherwise go unnoticed by physicians. AI also helps scientists learn more about the specific types of cancer. Utilising digital twin technology, the University of Limerick’s Digital Cancer Research Centre has developed an AI-powered platform that enables researchers to accelerate biomarker testing, enhance understanding of B-cell lymphoma treatment, and develop personalised therapies for patients.
The future of AI-powered healthcare and the power of collaboration
The future of AI-powered healthcare, underpinned by HPC, is promising, but one question remains: is the medical community sufficiently equipped to embrace this innovation? At the moment, the healthcare sector will reach $20.65 billion, which will likely increase to $187.95 billion by 2023.
To realise AI’s full potential and reap the benefits, industry leaders must invest in technology and promote training for medical professionals. It is, of course, advisable to approach this with a sense of realism. In healthcare, we’re seeing AI much more on the operational side and are still in a learning phase of understanding how it can impact care and care delivery. No matter what, AI requires some human oversight; without a doubt, AI unequivocally necessitates human oversight to prevent any potential harm or negative consequences.
With the technology and healthcare industry professionals working together, the next generation of patients will experience an improved level of care. The time to collaborate, innovate, and usher in the AI-powered healthcare revolution is now.
