Top Applications of Machine Learning in Healthcare

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9 min read

Web medical devices are preventing the current healthcare system from collapsing under the weight of the population, making technology-enabled smart healthcare a reality rather than a pipe dream.

Google has recently released an algorithm that uses machine learning to detect cancerous tumors in mammograms, while Stanford University researchers have employed deep learning to detect skin cancer. There are several areas of healthcare where machine learning (ML) is already helpful. One significant aspect of this transformation is virtual healthcare, which leverages machine learning algorithms to improve remote patient monitoring and telemedicine services.

Significance Of Machine Learning In The Healthcare Industry?

When applied to healthcare, machine learning is causing a sea change. The fields of clinical operations, medication development, and surgery are all benefiting from its rapid improvements. The most critical benefit of machine learning for healthcare is its improved ability to identify illness precursors, which in turn helps decrease hospital and clinic admissions and readmissions.

To ascertain if the disease is curable or imminently fatal, the technology analyzes data from satellites, social media, news, and even videos. By allowing doctors and nurses to focus on patient care and treatment rather than data management, machine learning presents limitless opportunities in healthcare.

By paving the way for these innovations and establishing new benchmarks for operational efficiency and patient care, Al and ML in healthcare are, in a nutshell, leading the pack.

What Are The Advantages of Machine Learning In Healthcare?

In the medical field, machine learning has several potential applications. Machine learning plays a crucial role in healthcare in many ways, including helping physicians detect diseases before they happen, researching drugs, creating individualized treatment plans, saving lives, decreasing costs, and many more. Machine learning has several important uses in healthcare, including:

1. Gathering Data More Rapidly

Medical facilities that are part of the Internet of Things (IoT) collect data in real time, which machine learning algorithms may analyze and adjust accordingly. For this reason alone, the FDA has been aggressively incorporating Al and ML into software for medical devices.

2. Cost-Efficient Process

You may save costs with machine learning for healthcare since it speeds up and improves the efficiency of medical services. To automate some tasks, maintain patient information, and plan appointments, ML can swiftly scan electronic health records (EHRs). Spending less time, money, and resources on repetitive chores is one way that machine learning applications might improve healthcare.

3. Predictive Analytics

Healthcare AI and ML can assist doctors and nurses prevent unnecessary hospital readmissions by predicting when patients' conditions will worsen, how diseases will advance, and the likelihood that they will need to be readmitted.

4. Patient Education And Engagement

To improve patient engagement and treatment plan adherence, chatbots and virtual assistants powered by ML give patients up-to-date medical information, remind them to take their prescriptions, and answer their questions.

5. Tailored Health Programs For Patients

By analyzing patient data on an individual basis, machine learning can tailor treatment strategies to meet the unique needs of each patient, leading to better outcomes with fewer side effects. Care is continually adjusted to the patient's developing state with this technique, which enables real-time therapeutic modifications.

6. Improving The Precision Of Diagnoses

With the use of machine learning algorithms, medical pictures, and patient data may be examined with incredible accuracy, leading to earlier and more precise diagnoses of disorders, even those that are difficult to detect or understand. Machine learning improves the reliability of diagnoses and paves the way for more efficient treatment plans by picking up on trends that humans might miss.

7. Drug Discovery And Development

Using massive data analysis, Machine Learning accelerates the drug discovery process using candidate identification, efficacy prediction, and R&D simplification of identified drugs. Using this technique, we can find promising medications faster and find possible adverse effects earlier, which reduces the time and money needed for drug development.

Top Healthcare Machine Learning Applications

1. Disease Assessment

Disease detection and diagnosis are two key areas where Machine Learning shines in healthcare. Better yet, AI can identify illnesses that doctors sometimes miss. Early cancer detection is notoriously difficult. Through genome-based tumor sequencing, IBM can produce alarming diagnoses.

2. Drug Discovery

A subset of machine learning methods, unsupervised learning can recognize trends in data without generating predictions. The use of machine learning in the early stages of drug development is a crucial therapeutic application. Scientific advancements, such as next-gen sequencing, can pave the way for the discovery of new treatments for certain illnesses.

3. Medical Imaging

Computer Vision is a game-changing technology that was made possible by machine learning and deep learning. More companies will enter the AI diagnostics market as a result of the increasing availability and capability of machine learning.

4. Tailored Medical Treatment

Although you may find AI-powered medicine to be highly beneficial for analytics and research, you may be perplexed by its potential bespoke applications. If you follow the thread to its conclusion, you'll notice that AI can improve the accuracy and efficiency of selecting a diagnosis from a set or assessing the treatment risk for any person. The AI can swiftly and properly sift through all of the resources that a doctor may have.

5. Behavioral Modification

Machine learning is rapidly expanding its use outside the realm of medicine and surgery. An increasing number of companies have emerged in response to the widespread use of machine learning in healthcare, with a focus on behavioral change as a key component of preventative medicine. Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly showing up in cancer research and patient care. We can even comprehend and modify our unconscious behavior with the help of a machine-learning tool that can identify common human movements.

6. Smart Health Records

Maintaining accurate medical records is a never-ending and draining chore. Data input is only one area where technology has been making strides for some time. It still takes a long time to finish most data-entering tasks. Reducing the complexity of processes and the associated costs of labor and materials is the primary goal of machine learning. AI is also capable of handling that. One example of this advancement is the ability to recognize handwriting.

7. Clinical Trial And Research

It might take years and a lot of capital to finish a clinical experiment. Researchers can find people who might be good candidates for clinical trials by using predictive analytics based on machine learning to look for things like social media activity and prior healthcare visits. Machine learning is also utilized to reduce the mistake rate in real-time participant monitoring and data access.

8. Crowdsourced Data Collection

Researchers and practitioners can have access to a wealth of patient data through crowdsourcing. Through Apple's Research Kit, people will have access to interactive applications that employ machine learning for face recognition to cure conditions like Asperger's and Parkinson's. IBM and Medtronic have now formed a partnership to provide real-time, crowdsourced data on insulin and diabetes.

9. Better Radiotherapy

There are a lot of independent factors in medical image analysis. It is simpler to diagnose and identify the variables when algorithms based on machine learning learn from the different available samples.

10. Outbreak Prediction

Outbreak prediction might make use of the most relevant and important AI applications. Scientists can now sift through mountains of data gleaned from sources such as satellite images, internet databases, and real-time social media. Before healthcare personnel on the ground may even be aware of an epidemic, this data is gathered and sorted through to discover signs of it.

11. Diabetes Prognosis

One of the most prevalent and potentially fatal illnesses is diabetes. In addition to negatively impacting health, it is a known carcinogen. The kidneys, heart, and nerves are hit the worst by diabetes. A life-saving application of machine learning might be the early detection of diabetes. Some possible classification algorithms that might be used to create a diabetes prediction system include KNN, Decision Tree, and Naive Bayes. In terms of both performance and computing time, Naive Bayes outperforms the others.

12. Predicting Liver Disease

Metabolic processes are mostly governed by the liver. Chronic hepatitis, cirrhosis, and liver cancer are disorders to which it is susceptible. Although there have been some notable advancements in this field, accurately predicting liver disease using massive volumes of medical data remains a formidable challenge. This is where machine learning methods like clustering and classification are making a huge impact. An appropriate dataset for this purpose could include the Indian Liver Patient Dataset (ILPD) or the Liver Disorders Dataset.

13. Discovering The Most Effective Treatment

Using Machine Learning in the early stages of patient-specific medication development is another fantastic application. Personalized medication combinations for the treatment of Acute Myeloid Leukemia are the current focus of Microsoft's Project Hanover, which makes use of AI-based technologies.

14. Controlling Epidemics

Data analytics has been a hot topic since 2020! Nowadays, specialists can analyze data from satellites, social media, news websites, and live video streaming. Global epidemics may be better understood if neural networks were able to digest all that data and draw conclusions. Potentially devastating illnesses can be stopped in their tracks before they can do any real harm. In developing nations without modern healthcare infrastructure, this is of the utmost importance.

The Internet-based reporting network ProMED-mail, which tracks epidemic reports worldwide, is likely to serve as the finest example of this field. Food safety also makes extensive use of AI, which aids in the prevention of epidemic diseases on farms.

Future Of Machine Learning In Healthcare

The healthcare business is a major source of income for many nations and provides value-based treatment to millions of individuals. At present, healthcare generates $1.668 trillion in income in the United States alone. Healthcare expenditures per capita in the world are higher than in the majority of other industrialized. Quality, Value, and Outcome are three terms that are often used to describe healthcare, and they carry great potential. In today's world, healthcare professionals and stakeholders are always seeking new methods to make good on this commitment.

Hundreds of millions of people rely on the healthcare business for their medical needs. There are a lot of ways in which artificial intelligence is changing healthcare. A helpful hand is being extended by information technology. Artificial intelligence (AI) involves the research and creation of computer programs with the ability to simulate human intellect. The ability to make decisions, solve complicated issues, identify objects, and much more. Artificial intelligence (AI) surpasses humans in speed and accuracy when it learns these operations.

Currently, AI is expanding its influence in areas that you may not have imagined, even outside industries such as marketing, gaming, banking, and the arts. The healthcare industry will feel the effects of artificial intelligence the most, even if the technology will boost global GDP by trillions in the next years.

Summing Up

Technology has become an integral part of modern healthcare, impacting not just patient care, billing, and records, but also the creation of smart healthcare, the reduction of administrative and supply costs, and new models for staffing and intellectual property capitalization. The use of machine learning in healthcare is one area that is slowly gaining traction in the sector.

When it comes to healthcare's potential for the future, machine learning is among the most promising technologies. As smart medical devices gain popularity, technology-enabled healthcare is becoming a reality. Artificial intelligence (AI) has great potential in healthcare since the sector is open to new ideas.