Essay: Welcome to the immediate future

UPDATE; DAY

Jean-Emmanuel Bibault is a bollé, as we say in colloquial language. He who dreamed of becoming a psychiatrist, now he finds himself, a few university years later, researcher in radiotherapy in a laboratory of the prestigious Stanford University, in Silicon Valley, then professor in radiotherapy oncology at the University of Paris-Cité and practitioner at the Georges-Pompidou European Hospital. 

Today, he is more convinced than ever that artificial intelligence will profoundly change the way he does his job and will improve the future of patients. 

“We are on the way to inventing machines who will heal us better than we are able to heal ourselves,” he says.

Fascinating! And we are only in the early stages. The chatbot ChatGPT, which we recently got to know, is just the tip of the iceberg.

If, as we often hear, AI does not replace health professionals in their multiple tasks, how can it improve the practice of medicine in areas such as screening, diagnosis, prediction, treatment? and even disease prevention? 

Accelerating diagnosis

First, comments the oncologist, it allows the acceleration of the diagnosis. Fighting cancer, for example, is often a race against time, and despite all the goodwill in the world, it can take several months before adequate treatment begins. 

Thanks to its massive megadatabases integrating a large number of parameters, and thanks to its capacity for interpretability, AI will allow better performance in terms of screening, diagnosis and treatment to be followed.

This is how this medical specialist created, with the help of a few other researchers, an AI to screen for the possibility of cancer in certain target populations.  

Such research with the AI help can also help detect infectious diseases linked to the environment, such as the Zika virus, dengue fever or chikungunya, which are found in tropical areas such as Cuba, for example. 

In the majority of cases, AI has been shown to outperform radiology experts in detecting the presence of cancer. By making early diagnoses (lungs, breast, liver, pancreas, prostate, bladder, brain, skin), thanks to AI, doctors can therefore initiate therapy in a timely manner and save lives.

< p>And even more

But it can go even further. In the case of “a doubt about a mole or a new pimple, no more waiting six months before the appointment with your dermatologist, take your phone, scan your skin and get a reliable and instantaneous answer ! »

In cardiology, AI has also stood out, thanks to its automated analysis of electrocardiograms. This also applies to diseases of the digestive tract where AI has made it possible to analyze certain videocapsules captured during endoscopy in less than ten minutes.

The fields of application of AI in medicine are infinite. We can even analyze the quality of sperm from a donor for artificial insemination, in order to increase the chances of success. 

This analysis can make it possible, among other things, to detect the risks of gestational diabetes, which normally occurs between the 24th and 28th week of pregnancy. Diets, physical exercises and training, sleep, psychiatry, depression, there are countless applications where artificial intelligence is successfully used.

The path traveled from the appearance of the Pascaline (Blaise Pascal's calculating machine) to the Apple iPad, via the Nintendo console, is gigantic. What if one day all the computers broke down? asks the researcher. I will always be a doctor and will continue to treat my patients, he replies, but I am however incapable of repairing a computer processor.

Risks

Of course, AI carries risks of abuse and intrusion into our private lives, among other things with ambient AI, which can monitor and evaluate your every move in a given place. It all comes down to user intent. Not for nothing that the GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) are interested in medicine. In 2020, AI was a $156 billion market. Hence the need to protect the confidentiality of patient data.

The author concludes, on an optimistic note, that in 2041, AI (now GAIA, for General Artificial Intelligence for All) will have won three Nobel Prizes: physics, chemistry and medicine. GAIA will make it possible to detect all diseases with great precision and to prevent them. 

Vivement 2041! 

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