Apr 16, 2017 02:52 AM EDT By Eleanor Bright, UniversityHerald Reporter

Artificial intelligence will soon augment the number of physicians and nurses to provide health care to billions of people worldwide. Health care assistants in the form of mobile apps are now taking over some tasks of nurses and physicians.

Currently, worldwide shortage of physicians and nurses has reached more than seven million. Filling the gap is difficult considering the amount of time and money needed to train physicians and nurses. The number of students taking nursing, medicine and other healthcare related courses had been dwindling in the past years. In response to the dire and immediate need for more healthcare providers, hospitals turn to AI or artificial intelligence, the TNW reported.

AI or artificial intelligence may not be able to replace physicians, nurses and other human healthcare providers. Yet, they can be used to reduce routine tasks so that physicians and nurses could focus on treating patients and saving lives. Moreover, there are tings that AI can do faster and more accurately than human healthcare workers.

Stanford University researchers had created an AI algorithm that can identify different kinds of skin cancer. The deep learning algorithm was provided with 130,000 images of different types of rashes, lesions and moles. A person that suspects a mole may be cancerous can take an image of the mole using his smartphone and the person can see read his results right away, the Stanford reported.

IBM created Watson, a platform that helps diagnose and recommend treatments for cancer. The platform is fed with data from clinical trials and information taken from medical journals. Watson can make a diagnosis and recommend treatments as accurately as oncologists.

While some people worry that AI or artificial intelligence would be taking away jobs, those who created it believed that humans must be cared by humans. AI is there to make things faster, easier and more accurate so that nurses and physicians could do their tasks faster and better.

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