Artificial Intelligence (AI) was first used in medicine in 1965. Scientists at Stanford University came up with a program that analyzed organic compounds. The more powerful computers became, the more rapidly AI penetrated various fields of health care. Now a computer can not only help you play at कसीनो but also sequence a patient’s genome (sequencing more than three billion nucleotides!) in just five hours. This is a breakthrough achievement in disease diagnosis. It’s listed in the Guinness Book of World Records.
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Confidence of Investors and the Medical Community
There is definitely interest in medtech startups, but investors and funds are now pursuing a very cautious strategy with regard to medtech, realizing the difficulty of entering this market.
In medtech, there is a rather long cycle for companies to reach self-sufficiency, including the need for a complicated and lengthy procedure for registering a medical device.
In addition, over the past two years, a series of major bankruptcies and frauds swept through the market, which could not go unnoticed. The most notable case is the Theranos bubble. Their blood analysis technology was valued at $9 billion. An equally high-profile case involved the bankruptcy of Jawbone, a manufacturer of wearable electronics and fitness trackers. A number of reputable investment funds, such as Sequoia and Khosla Ventures, invested over €1 billion in the company.
A report published last year by MMC, a London-based venture capital firm, said that almost half of all European startups that position themselves as related to artificial intelligence do not actually use the technology.
AI in the Diagnosis of Diseases
Thousands of people are dying because of a misdiagnosis. AI is now helping doctors to diagnose diseases more accurately and select treatments. Some scientists have used artificial intelligence to teach health bracelets to detect COVID-19 days before symptoms appear, others to identify Alzheimer’s disease from a single MRI scan. In the near future, if the technology spreads, there will be a patch that diagnoses stomach diseases. One of the most important tasks for AI in medicine is to learn how to detect cancer, the threat of stroke, heart attack, and other serious diseases as early as possible.
AI in Drug Development
Just as many discoveries have been made with the help of AI in the development of new drugs. A huge achievement can be considered the fact that Americans have trained a computer to build a 3d-model of any protein by its genetic code. In 2021, almost 99 percent of human protein models are freely available, opening up limitless possibilities for scientific research, including pharmaceuticals. The creation of a vaccine for the coronavirus is not without AI. The pharmaceutical company Pfizer involved it in every stage of drug development, as well as in the creation of pills for the disease.
Research on chemical compounds using AI has a downside. American scientists reconfigured the computer for the sake of the experiment, and it invented 40 thousand potentially lethal chemical compounds in six hours. So the researchers clearly showed how important the ethical side of working with AI in medicine is.
AI in Surgery
Surgeons first turned to robotics in 1985 in the USA. It was a leg surgery – the robot assisted. Since then, technology has come a long way, but robots are still not trusted to perform complex operations themselves. Machine learning technology could change a lot in the future. In 2020, U.S. researchers taught a robot how to stitch by showing it a video of the surgery. In 2022, a robot performed a complex operation on a pig’s intestines on its own and did even better than a human.
