How AI can improve service delivery in Pakistan's healthcare sector.

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of our lives. We take it for granted without realising we use it every day. Imagine visiting a place before Google Maps was introduced. Or the hassle of sifting through your emails without a spam filter.

The father of modern computer science, Alan Turing said, 'Artificial Intelligence refers to tasks being performed by machines such that it computes anything that is computable and gives results which can deceive us into believing it was a humans' output'.

If you have heard about self-driving cars or received a predictive text suggestion on your phone, you are already familiar with the advancements of AI technology. From face detection, YouTube suggestions, Facebook relevant feeds to humanoid robots, prediction and diagnosis of diseases, robotic surgeries, AI has come a long way.

The possible benefits of AI are also creeping into the healthcare industry.

How can AI help medical practice?

In some parts of the world, AI is used to improve accuracy of diagnoses in medical imaging through computer-aided detection and segmentation, which can potentially be overlooked by the human eye. In Pakistan, almost 95 per cent households have at least one mobile phone. AI can use this tool to detect diseases such as skin or oral cancer through camera images.

One of the most time-consuming tasks healthcare professionals deal with is going through patients' medical documents. AI enabled electronic health records is an effective solution to this problem. It can make automated retrieval of context-relevant patient data from stacks of medical documents through text recognition, reducing redundant diagnostic tests and operational expenditures. This will allow clinicians to give appropriate attention to the patient and improve patient-provider interaction.

AI's competence is substantial in clinical decision support, patient engagement and continuous remote monitoring through setting up reminder messages for medicine intake, follow-ups with consultants, or suggesting diagnostic tests to clinicians.

Local advancements

Pakistan has great potential in AI. It developed AI technology to curb the spread of Covid-19 such as contact tracing apps to send automated texts to people if they were within a two-metre radius of a Covid positive patient. Students at Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute and DetectNow created an AI algorithm to screen for Covid-19 through voice recognition by sensing a patient's dry...