HEALTHTECH: What are some of the most widespread AI applications in healthcare right now?
SAFRAN: It crosses many things, from healthcare providers to screening, surgeries, hospital and consumer applications. One of the most widespread applications is in radiology. AI companies are amassing vast amounts of data and saving time for radiologists to ensure experts need to look only at the parts of the scans for which they’re needed. AI can also flag problems that may have gone unnoticed. For example, someone may come in for a CT or orthopedic condition and find a problem that no one was even looking for.
READ MORE: Telehealth leads to positive outcomes in patient behavior.
AI is also used in surgery planning. You can take a CT scan and automatically generate a model of the anatomy for surgery. These surgical planning cases have been around for a while, but AI now makes the algorithms more accurate and robust, with less manual work. Without computer vision, the surgeon can only imagine, but with AI and a 3D model, they can now look at every detail of it to quantify that 3D information.
HEALTHTECH: What other applications might we see in the near future?
SAFRAN: One of the most interesting ones is surgical intelligence, where players develop capabilities that could analyze video and flag issues. It could provide 3D information to the surgeon with safety warnings. These are challenging problems to solve technologically, and there is a lot of potential work being done here under the radar.