AYE, AYE, AI

Artificial intelligence is redefining health care. In India, it is already being used in radiology, cardiology, eye and cancer care. And while research is on to expand its use, better investment and training are crucial  

- POOJA BIRAIA JAISWAL

When she started her practice about two decades ago, Dr Darshana Sanghvi, a radiologist from Mumbai’s Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital, had almost 12 to 14 assistants, each of whom would do everything manually. Today, her work and the way she does it have completely changed. “I did not even have digital information then,”she gasps. “Mostly, the image stats that came from the MRI would be captured on films, which would then be put up on the physical film box, and not on a computer. So if there are a hundred images, which would be the case on any given day, someone would have to manually do everything—right from print the films, collect and segregate them, put them on the view box. Then I would see them and dictate the report to a typist. The report would be printed and dispatched. There were at least 12-14 people to do all of this. But now, it has come down to just four of them as everything is done by artificial intelligence (AI).”

Now all they have to do is simply tell the machine orally that they need to do an MRI, say, of the knee for trauma. “From thereon everything is automated,” says Sanghvi. “The images are acquired by deep learning algorithms, which, in turn, send them to the servers for post processing of the data, which was done by us in the past and was extremely time-consuming. This is a step prior to interpretation.”