Apr 05, 2017 09:26 AM EDT By Mark Spencer, UniversityHerald Reporter

It is not hard to envision that sometime in the future robots will work alongside their human counterparts to work with patients. While some skeptics may argue that machines can never truly replace doctors and other health care professionals, deep learning AI is slowly transforming the healthcare industry.

The latest development in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology now allows a more improved method of diagnostics, methods of treatment and predicting outcomes. Visualize coming in to see a healthcare professional with some sort of ailment. After an initial assessment, the symptoms are fed to a computer, which then pulls up all the research that the professional needs to know about how to diagnose and treat the problem.

How about a routine MRI or an X-ray? An AI may find something that is too inconspicuous for humans to identify. An AI that scans medical records and cross reference results with family history to be able to come up with a viable treatment protocol and suggest it to the professional, tailored to the patient's needs.

The arrival of the machines

While the use of AI is very much in its infancy stage and have barely scratched the surface, there have been significant developments that are worthy of note.

BBC News reported an AI program, early this year, was able to identify skin cancer through a series of photographs, which had Stanford University researchers excited, even believing the AI could be used by turning any smartphone into a cancer scanner, a lofty idea that might be the advent of a "Star Trek" like medical tricorder.

IBM's Watson also has success stories, in analyzing 1,000 cancer diagnoses, Watson was able to correctly diagnose 99 percent of the cases and was able to recommend treatment plans that matched that of actual oncologists. Not only was Watson able to scan through thousands of documents in minutes, it even found treatment option human doctors missed in 30 percent of the cases, according to Futurism.

A similar AI program is reportedly having a similar level of success in diagnosing cataracts, featured in Live Science. The beauty of an AI-assisted diagnosis is that while the machine is analyzing data, the doctors can spend more time with the patient.

However, while AI would eventually revolutionize the medical field in the coming years, physicians would often find themselves perplexed on how to incorporate the technology into their practice. Once fully integrated, only then can it be fully exploited by lending itself to more efficient and accurate routine checkups to more specialized areas of medicine.

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