Medicine

Physical Assistance

This field includes robots and nanorobots assisting doctors during surgery and patients during their treatment and recovery. Nanorobots are about the size of a nanometer and is a relatively new technology that might be able to kill cancer cells and improve vaccines.

COVID-19

The rise of COVID-19 has resulted in a drastic increase of the use of Artificial Intelligence across the board. Most obviously, quarantine periods all over the world increased the use of digital technology. People were sent home from work, and forced to adapt to a totally new format using Zoom and other applications in order to communicate with coworkers. While Zoom Video Communications and other technology-based companies “zoomed,” other companies suffered immensely. This called for innovation, and in these short months, the economy was radically revamped through the use of AI (see Economy tab).

This sudden pandemic also encouraged scientists and developers to start using AI for the greater good. Their innovations were implemented to improve both COVID testing, and in the search of a capable treatment.

Although not widespread, (Chen et al., 2019) has released an article discussing artificially intelligent biosensors that are being developed as “point-of-care testing for infectious diseases.” The system scans for biomarkers such as antibodies, aptamer, and the pathogen itself, and then reports its findings. According to the study, this AI can identify infection in real time, making it extremely effective as a medical treatment, and contributing to epidemic outbreak prevention. This is an especially timely breakthrough, considering our country’s newly exposed weakness to pandemics. One of the major issues of early COVID-19 was deciding treatments for specific individuals. Would a ventilator increase chances of survival, or worsen the condition of the patient? That issue is precisely what is addressed by this use of POC testing, and the perfect example of how A.I. can be used successfully in a variety of ways, including for the purpose of medicine.

In China, scientists took a different approach in studying the potential of medical A.I. to discover treatments. When the outbreak began in Wuhan, China in 2019, the use of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) as a treatment for the virus was gaining popularity. Some experts strongly opposed the use of it, while others swore by its legitimacy. Chinese scientist Zeheng Wang published an article in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, in which a study was conducted to evaluate the merit of TCM using Artificial Neural Network (ANN), an artificially intelligent deep learning system. The use of this system was found to have great success as ANN is becoming increasingly effective in describing relationships between data that it identifies (Zhang et al., 2020). In addition, this technology has already developed a suitable approach towards high-accuracy TCM prediction (Yao et al., 2019). Not only does this reveal the merit to treating COVID-19 using traditional medicine, scientists also state, “Utilizing deep learning (human like evaluation), recent research have also predicted possible modern antiviral drugs for COVID-19 (Beck et al., 2020).” Ultimately, they concluded that some TCM were safe to be approved for the treatment of COVID-19, while others were not considered good treatments, or were associated with unwanted side effects.

These uses of A.I. mainly express that its use is always in question; both for good and bad. A.I. can be utilized when addressing basically anything. And, in a time where a pandemic is ravaging through the planet alongside countless other health emergencies, A.I. might be our vehicle to a solution.