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Peta Rolls grew accustomed to receiving the AI's regular check-in at 10am.

A daily check-in call by an automated voice assistant was not part of the care package the participant expected when she enrolled for St Vincent’s in-home support but when they asked to be part of the trial several months back, the elderly lady said yes because she wished to contribute. Although, to be honest, her expectations were low.

Nevertheless, when the call came through, she says: “I was amazed by how interactive she was. It was remarkable for a machine.”

“She’d always ask ‘how you are today?’ and that gives you an opportunity if you’re feeling sick to mention your symptoms, or I just say ‘I’m fine, thank you’.”

“She would go on to ask follow-up questions – ‘have you had a chance to step outside today?’”

Aida would also ask what Rolls was planning for the day and “she would respond to that properly.”

“If I would say I plan to go shopping, it would ask nice shopping or food shopping? I found it entertaining.”

AI Reducing the Workload on Healthcare Staff

The trial, which has recently concluded its initial stage, is one of the ways in which advances in artificial intelligence are being integrated in the medical field.

Health tech firm the provider partnered with St Vincent’s regarding the trial to utilize its generative AI technology to offer companionship, as well as an opportunity for home care clients to report any medical concerns or concerns for a caregiver to address.

A senior director, head of St Vincent’s At Home, says the service being trialled does not replace any in-person visits.

“Recipients continue to get a weekly personal visit, but in between visits … the automated system allows a routine call, which can then escalate any possible issues to either our team or a family members,” the director says.

Dr Tina Campbell, the CEO of the company, reports there have been no any adverse incidents noted from the St Vincent’s trial.

The company uses advanced AI “with very clear guardrails and prompts” to ensure the interaction is safe and mechanisms are in place to respond to serious health issues promptly, Campbell states. As an instance, if a client is experiencing heart symptoms, it would be alerted to the care team and the call ended so the person could call emergency services.

Campbell believes artificial intelligence has an significant part given staffing shortages across the medical industry.

“The benefit very safely, using such systems, is reduce the administrative load on the staff so trained clinicians can concentrate on doing the job that they specialize in,” she says.

Artificial Intelligence Long Established as You Might Think

Prof Enrico Coiera, the founder of the national AI health alliance, says older forms of AI have been a common feature of healthcare for a considerable period, frequently in “back office services” such as interpreting scans, cardiograms and pathology test results.

“Software that carries out a function that requires judgment in some way is artificial intelligence, irrespective of how it accomplishes it,” states Coiera, who is also the head of the health informatics center at a leading university.

“When visiting the radiology unit, radiology department or pathology lab, you’ll see software in equipment doing just that.”

Over the past decade, advanced versions of artificial intelligence known as “deep learning” – a neural network method that allows systems to learn from very large sets of data – have been used to interpret diagnostic scans and improve diagnosis, Coiera notes.

Recently, BreastScreen NSW became the nation's pioneering public health initiative to adopt machine reading technology to support specialists in reviewing a specific set of breast scans.

These represent advanced systems that still require a qualified physician to evaluate the diagnosis they could indicate, and the accountability for a clinical judgment rests with the medical practitioner, the professor says.

AI’s Role in Early Disease Detection

A research center in Melbourne has been collaborating with scientists from a UK university who pioneered AI methods to identify epilepsy brain abnormalities called specific brain malformations from MRI images.

These lesions cause seizures that crequently cannot be controlled with drugs, so surgery to excise the tissue becomes the sole option. However, the procedure can proceed if the surgeons can pinpoint the abnormal tissue.

In research recently released in the journal Epilepsia, a group from the research body, headed by neurologist the lead researcher, demonstrated their “AI epilepsy detective” could identify the abnormalities in nearly all of instances from MRI and PET scans in a specific form of the malformations that have historically been missed in the majority of cases (60%).

The system was developed using the images of a group of individuals and then tested on 17 children and 12 adults. Among the youngsters, twelve underwent operations and 11 are now seizure free.

The tool uses neural network classifiers comparable with the mammography analysis – highlighting suspicious areas, which are subsequently reviewed by experts “speeding up the process to get to the answers,” Macdonald-Laurs explains.

She emphasises the team are still in the “early phases” of the project, with a further study necessary to get the technology toward clinical implementation.

A leading neurologist, a brain specialist who was independent from the research, notes modern imaging now generate such huge amounts of high-resolution data that it is hard for a person to review it accurately. So for doctors the challenge of finding these lesions was like “identifying the needle in the haystack.”

“This illustrates of how AI can support clinicians in making quicker, precise identifications, and has the potential to improve operation opportunities and results for kids with treatment-resistant seizures,” Cook comments.

Disease Detection in the Years Ahead

Dr Stefan Buttigieg, the deputy head of the international body's AI health division, says deep neural networks are also helping to monitor and predict disease outbreaks.

Buttigieg, who presented last month at the Public Health of Australia’s conference in the city, gave as an example a tech firm, a organization set up by infectious disease specialists and which was an early detector to identify the Covid-19 outbreak.

Generative AI is a additional branch of machine learning, in which the technology can generate new content using training data. Such applications in healthcare include tools such as the virtual assistant as well as the AI scribes clinicians are increasingly using.

A GP representative, the president of the national GP body, reports family doctors have been embracing digital assistants, which records the consultation and converts it to a consultation note that can be added to the health file.

Wright says the main benefit of the scribes is that it improves the standard of the interaction between the physician and individual.

Dr Danielle McMullen, the chair of the Australian Medical Association, concurs that AI note-takers are assisting physicians optimise their time and adds artificial intelligence can also help to prevent duplication of tests and scans for their clients, if the {promised digitisation|planned digitalization