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Indian Pediatr 2019;56:796 |
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Artificial Intelligence
– Futuristic Pediatric Healthcare
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Ekta Maini *
and Bondu Venkateshwarlu
Dayananda Sagar University, Bengaluru, Karnataka,
India.
Email:
[email protected]
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Quality, affordability and accessibility in healthcare services are the
three biggest challenges faced by Indian population. A recent report
ranks India at 145th
place
out of 195 countries on the basis of healthcare access and quality index
[1]. As majority of patients do not approach a physician in the initial
stages, their disease is usually diagnosed when it has reached an
advanced stage. This results in increased the cost of treatment, and
also reduces the likelihood of recovery [2]. Early detection of disease
followed by holistic management can help in prevention of such diseases.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be useful in developing cost-effective
and easily accessible digital tools for pediatricians in identifying
diseases in their early stages.
AI comprises of highly capable softwares with ability
to do jobs that need human intelligence like thinking, learning and
decision-making. These features can be used to build prediction models
to diagnose the diseases in the early stages. The performance of such
prediction models is evaluated in terms of accuracy, precision and
f-measure [3]. Once the performance of the model is acceptable, it is
then hosted on the public domain, which can be easily accessed by the
pediatrician through internet. Once the vital data attributes of the
patient are fed in the prediction system, a risk score is generated. A
patient with a high-risk score shall be instructed by the medical
practitioner to consult the specialist so that the treatment can be
started timely.
Thus, AI ensures a cost-effective way of diagnosing
the diseases in an early stage, and can help greatly in reducing medical
complications in diseases like diabetes [4]. Though India has adopted
electronic health record (EHR) policy, there is no uniformity of
interpretation of digitized records. Also, there are huge concerns on
privacy and security of data. Stakeholders should resolve these issues
as early as possible so that AI-enabled healthcare facilities are made
available to all. Development of AI research skills shall be a great
step to provide a healthy future to every child. Indian Academy of
Pediatrics can play an important and big role in this regard.
References
1. GBD 2016 Healthcare Access and Quality
Collaborators. Measuring performance on the Healthcare Access and
Quality Index for 195 countries and territories and selected subnational
locations: A systematic analysis from the Global Burden of Disease Study
2016. Lancet. 2018; 391:2236-71.
2. World Health Organization. WHO Global Action Plan
for the Prevention And Control of Non-communicable Diseases 2013-2020.
Available from: http://www.who.int/nmh/events/ncd_action_plan/en/.
Accessed April 26, 2019.
3. Maini E, Venkateswarlu B, Gupta A. Applying
machine learning algorithms to develop a universal cardiovascular
disease prediction system. In: Hemant J, Fernando X, Lafate P,
Baig Z(eds). International Conference on Intelligent Data Communication
Technologies and Internet of Things ICICI 2018, Lecture Notes on Data
Engineering and Communications Technologies. 2019(26):627-32.
4. Kaur H, Kumari V. Predictive modelling and
analytics for diabetes using a machine learning approach. Applied
Computing and Informatics. 2018;doi: 10.1016j.aci.2018. 12.004.
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