Article by Afifa Waheed: “Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics have enormous potential in healthcare and are quickly shifting the landscape – emerging as a transformative force. They offer a new dimension to the way healthcare professionals approach disease diagnosis, treatment and monitoring. AI is being used in healthcare to help diagnose patients, for drug discovery and development, to improve physician-patient communication, to transcribe voluminous medical documents, and to analyse genomics and genetics. Labs are conducting research work faster than ever before, work that otherwise would have taken decades without the assistance of AI. AI-driven research in life sciences has included applications looking to address broad-based areas, such as diabetes, cancer, chronic kidney disease and maternal health.
In addition to increasing the knowledge of access to postnatal and neonatal care, AI can predict the risk of adverse events in antenatal and postnatal women and their neonatal care. It can be trained to identify those at risk of adverse events, by using patients’ health information such as nutrition status, age, existing health conditions and lifestyle factors.
AI can further be used to improve access to women located in rural areas with a lack of trained professionals – AI-enabled ultrasound can assist front-line workers with image interpretation for a comprehensive set of obstetrics measurements, increasing quality access to early foetal ultrasound scans. The use of AI assistants and chatbots can also improve pregnant mothers’ experience by helping them find available physicians, schedule appointments and even answer some patient questions…
Many healthcare professionals I have spoken to emphasised that pre-existing conditions such as high blood pressure that leads to preeclampsia, iron deficiency, cardiovascular disease, age-related issues for those over 35, various other existing health conditions, and failure in the progress of labour that might lead to Caesarean (C-section), could all cause maternal deaths. Training AI models to detect these diseases early on and accurately for women could prove to be beneficial. AI algorithms can leverage advanced algorithms, machine learning (ML) techniques, and predictive models to enhance decision-making, optimise healthcare delivery, and ultimately improve patient outcomes in foeto-maternal health…(More)”.