THE COOLEST KID ON THE BLOCK: Artificial Intelligence (AI)
What is this artificial intelligence (AI) everyone keeps talking about? Defined as the simulation of human brilliance and intelligence by systems or machines, AI has seen an increase in awareness in the past couple of months, and with a plethora of applications in various fields, AI is definitely the coolest kid on the block. However, AI is not a new system. The term artificial intelligence was coined in 1956 by John McCarthy during a conference at Dartmouth College. Since then AI tools have been developed for proving mathematical theorems, facial recognition, fraud prevention in e-commerce, and determining what posts and pages will be displayed on your Instagram explore page based on the accounts you follow and the content you like. The list is simply inexhaustible.
How relevant is AI in medical science?
A notable invention is IBM’s Doctor Watson. A platform that focuses on the diagnosis and treatment of cancer in four simple steps; a) inputting patient data, b) searching and providing treatment proposals, c) sorting the proposals by prior knowledge reserves, and d) giving a final proposal as well as confidence level of the proposal. However, as with anything new, Doctor Waston is not without flaws. Since it was developed in the US, the proposal it generates might not be suitable for patients in countries with different insurance policies, and the data it relies on still needs to be updated manually.
In 2020, the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed a digital healthcare quick response (QR) code for the detection of COVID-19. Citizens had to upload their records online and were assigned colour-coded QR codes afterwards. The codes were developed to a) detect potential contact with confirmed COVID-19 cases and b) to indicate the person’s health status using mobile big data. The colours assigned were: Green– indicating healthy patients fit for daily life, amber, for risky patients requiring quarantine, and red for COVID-19-confirmed patients.
Lastly, IDx-DR is an image-based AI developed by the FDA for detecting and automating early diagnosis of Diabetic Retinopathy.
Several applications of AI cannot be mentioned in this newsletter, however, there is still work to be done, and if previous advancements can be relied on, then we can be sure to expect more from developers in the future.
● June Workshop
We organized a successful workshop in the month of June and here are some images from the event.
We will be organizing our last workshop for the year in November, see you there.
You can check out our workshop page for more information and registration.
Thank you for choosing African Biosciences as your research partner. We look forward to serving you in 2024 and beyond.