Clinical Fellowship Chronicles: How Artificial Intelligence Powers Precision Medicine
Advanced artificial intelligence and precision medicine could forever change healthcare as we know it. In the fifth installment of the Clinical Fellowship Chronicles, Tiffany D’souza explores the challenges, implications and potential of this technology on patient care.
No two people on Earth live the same lifestyle, in the same environment, and with the same set of genes. So why has modern medicine taken a blanket approach to treating patients?
There’s no “one-size-fits-all” way to practice medicine. While treatments have traditionally been developed using demographic data instead of a patient’s unique health profile, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to create individualized treatments and make precision medicine more widely available.
What is Precision Medicine?
Precision medicine (PM) tailors medical decisions, treatments, practices or products around a patient’s specific genetic, cellular and molecular makeup. By analyzing data from genomics, electronic health records (EHRs) and even wearable devices, precision medicine looks at a patient holistically in order to create more personalized treatment plans.
Precision medicine shows promise across the healthcare industry — especially in preventive medicine. By indicating if a patient needs early screening or prophylactic treatment, preventive medicine can predict the onset of chronic, life-threatening diseases like cancer.
For example, by leveraging AI, oncologists can now analyze a tumor, obtain its unique genetic makeup and use the results to predict a person’s response to specific kinds of treatment.
It’s also been used in surgical care to select procedures with the best outcome scores based on the patient’s unique profile, instead of generic national standards. This can improve the standard of patient care and might reduce post-surgical complications.
Precision medicine can even:
- Improve the results of clinical research by matching people to the right studies quickly and more accurately, allowing scientists to maximize their use of our resources.
- Assist with pharmaceutical research by predicting an individual’s response to certain drugs, and
- Tailor medications to a person’s specific needs during drug development
Thanks to these advancements, medicine is starting to trend away from population-level patient care. Since artificial intelligence has the capacity to process vast amounts of genetic, lifestyle and environmental data, we’re creating a reality where treatments can be tailored to each patient faster and more accurately.
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Precision Medicine
AI enables these fast, accurate decisions through artificial neural networks (ANNs), a subset of machine learning that mimics the brain’s neural network. Much like human neural networks, the ANN scours millions of data points to deliver more comprehensive patient profiles and targeted treatments.
These models can read thousands of variables like heart rate, genetic code and family history almost instantaneously. They can also analyze medical cases with positive and negative outcomes to figure out the best approach to treating a patient.
Despite the advancements in medicine we’ve made in the last century, humans don’t have the processing power to analyze that volume of information successfully. We need artificial intelligence, machine learning and neural networks to do that work for us in order to achieve precision medicine and truly personalized care.
Is Precision Medicine Possible?
Despite the potential of precision medicine, the medical community must address several questions around this technology:
Can providers trust machines to make clinical decisions?
There’s no way for us to understand how artificial neural networks (ANNs) truly work because they are closed, black-box systems. That means the algorithms used to make decisions are so complex that only other computers can interpret why certain results were produced.
Since doctors are dealing with potentially life-or-death medical decisions — and since we can’t understand the inner workings of the black box — this technology breeds hesitancy and distrust among many clinicians.
Is it possible to deliver precision medicine at scale?
Precision medicine provides a solution to an array of medical problems. However, the healthcare industry can’t sustainably support the invention of individualized prophylactic drugs, treatment plans and screening techniques for a world population of 7.7 billion people — and counting.
What precision medicine can do is narrow down broad demographic categories into smaller, more specific groups. This might allow us to target people as unique entities for conditions like leukemia, breast cancer, colon cancer and more.
Does today’s healthcare data show the full picture?
Every AI solution relies on quality data to make decisions. Unfortunately, the data needed to support precision medicine exists in a fragmented ecosystem, with information spread across disparate wearable devices, lab results, prescription information and EHRs that don’t talk to each other.
Organizing and cleaning unstructured data is time-consuming, and in many cases, it may not even be possible. And with patient safety on the line, making decisions using inaccurate or incomplete data could be catastrophic.
Luckily, with AI gaining momentum, the medical industry is pushing to improve how it documents patient visits, notes and encounters in EHRs, which make up the bulk of these data sets. It’s also working on providing structure to historical data so intelligent systems can make better, more informed decisions that directly impact patient care.
Realizing the Potential of Precision Medicine
Despite these challenges, artificial intelligence promises to push precision medicine forward and make individualized patient care a reality. It’s actually the perfect use case for AI, especially in a climate where this technology is often forced as a solution but isn’t the best fit.
If we do this right, precision medicine can change healthcare for the better by personalizing treatments for everything from diabetes and high blood pressure to cancer and heart disease. The medical world needs to start planning for the impact of AI and precision medicine now because together, they are going to revolutionize how we approach patient care.
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Tiffany D’souza
Tiffany is completing a Healthcare Innovation Fellowship at The DICE Group before applying to her residency. She is also an online fitness coach and social media marketing consultant who loves baking cookies, solving crossword puzzles and exploring the potential of healthcare technology.
