CIOInsider India Magazine

The application of Machine Learning (ML) in the fields of healthcare and medicine is at the moment the trendiest topic in the AI field to discuss among researchers. With the advent of advanced processing power, memory, storage and unprecedented amount of data, computers are being able to accomplish complex learning tasks with astonishing success. With the rise of big data managing applications, the potential to utilize ML for the purpose of reading big data sets could accelerate the process of disease identification. Machine Learning has been able to penetrate through a lot of verticals across the healthcare industry from diagnosis of diseases and drug development, all the way to epidemiology. Let us dive into in-depth details in which ML applications has revolutionized the medical field.

Up until recent times the field of Medicine heavily

relied upon heuristics – the process of acquiring knowledge through experience and repeated learning via experimentations based on trial and error methods. Now, there is a growing realization about the potential of Machine Learning that has the ability to give information from numerous sources into an integrated system. Since, Machine Learning operates on algorithms; healthcare experts are leveraging this technology to develop algorithms for the machines or supercomputers that can help them in analyzing abnormalities inside the human body through advanced imagery techniques. For instance Google has developed a Machine Learning algorithm that helps identify Cancerous tumours. Similarly, Stanford University has developed a deep learning algorithm that helps identify Skin Cancer.

Machine Learning has the ability to gather and accumulate sufficient information about a patient which enables doctors to devise unique personalized care for each patient. Machine Learning is proving to be another useful option when it comes to Radiotherapy and Radiology. Doctors can use this technology to identify any abnormalities. Perhaps the most revolutionary usage of ML techniques in the Medical field is the process of drug discovery. It has enabled the medical experts to test experiments of various drugs on subjects, and process the results with the help of ML algorithms. This enables them to develop new drugs for the pharmaceutical companies. Another innovative use of ML applications in the field Medicine and Healthcare is the use of surgical robots. These surgical robots are proving to be of great help to the doctors as it provides them with detailed imagery, and reach out important places during the process of a surgery.

It is evident that ML applications are bringing about a paradigm shift in the healthcare sector from research to its clinical applications .The Healthcare industry needs to stop viewing Machine Learning applications as a futuristic concept but rather accept the fact that it has become an indispensable part of our reality.