AI Is Helping Scan For Diseases, Ease Scientist Workload

Yahoo Finance is reporting that artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used to scan for diseases amid a shortage of scientists. It’s no secret the U.S. healthcare system needs help. With...
AI Is Helping Scan For Diseases, Ease Scientist Workload
Written by Matt Milano

Yahoo Finance is reporting that artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used to scan for diseases amid a shortage of scientists.

It’s no secret the U.S. healthcare system needs help. With an aging population, increasing threat of litigation, expanding government regulation and more, the U.S. is expected to see a shortage of “nearly 122,000 physicians by 2032 as demand for physicians continues to grow faster than supply,” according to the AAMC.

Startup Proscia is positioning itself as the solution. The company “recently teamed up with Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to develop applications that incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) to advance the practice of pathology for multiple diseases.” The goal is to teach AI what to look for and then use it to handle the preliminary scans, flagging samples that require closer, human inspection.

“Most of what the pathologist is doing is spending time looking for that needle-in-a-haystack instance of tumor in a case that’s otherwise benign,” David West, co-founder and CEO, told Yahoo Finance.

West says Proscia is trying to overcome some of the challenges that have plagued AI in a medical setting, namely allowing an unintentional bias to creep into the AI as a result of training data that is too limited in scope.

“It’s where AI has always failed,” said West. “The scientific community and industry is just now beginning to think about the scalability challenges. So that’s where we’ve focused almost all of our work.”

If Proscia is successful, it could help pave the way for more efficient and accurate medical results.

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