The Algorithm Will See You Now
Artificial intelligence in medicine, still in an early phase, stands to transform how doctors and nurses spend their time.
There's a quiet revolution going on in medicine. It's driven by artificial intelligence, but paradoxically, new technology may put a more human face on healthcare.
AI's usefulness in healthcare ranges far and wide.
Artificial intelligence is software that can process massive amounts of information and learn over time, arriving at decisions with striking accuracy and efficiency. It offers greater accuracy in diagnosis, exponentially faster genome sequencing, the mining of medical literature and patient records at breathtaking speed, a dramatic reduction in administrative bureaucracy, personalized medicine, and even the democratization of healthcare.
The algorithms that bring these advantages won't replace doctors; rather, by offloading some of the most time-consuming tasks in healthcare, providers will be able to focus on personal interactions with patients—listening, empathizing, educating and generally putting the care back in healthcare. The relationship can focus on the alleviation of suffering, both the physical and emotional kind.
Challenges of Getting AI Up and Running
The AI revolution, still in its early phase in medicine, is already spurring some amazing advances, despite the fact that some experts say it has been overhyped. IBM's Watson Health program is a case in point. IBM capitalized on Watson's ability to process natural language by designing algorithms that devour data like medical articles and analyze images like MRIs and medical slides. The algorithms help diagnose diseases and recommend treatment strategies.
But Technology Review reported that a heavily hyped partnership with the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston fell apart in 2017 because of a lack of data in the proper format. The data existed, just not in a way that the voraciously data-hungry AI could use to train itself.
The hiccup certainly hasn't dampened the enthusiasm for medical AI among other tech giants, including Google and Apple, both of which have invested billions in their own healthcare projects. At this point, the main challenge is the need for algorithms to interpret a huge diversity of data mined from medical records. This can include everything from CT scans, MRIs, electrocardiograms, x-rays, and medical slides, to millions of pages of medical literature, physician's notes, and patient histories. It can even include data from implantables and wearables such as the Apple Watch and blood sugar monitors.
None of this information is in anything resembling a standard format across and even within hospitals, clinics, and diagnostic centers. Once the algorithms are trained, however, they can crunch massive amounts of data at blinding speed, with an accuracy that matches and sometimes even exceeds that of highly experienced doctors.
Genome sequencing, for example, took years to accomplish as recently as the early 2000s. The Human Genome Project, the first sequencing of the human genome, was an international effort that took 13 years to complete. In April of this year, Rady Children's Institute for Genomic Medicine in San Diego used an AI-powered genome sequencing algorithm to diagnose rare genetic diseases in infants in about 20 hours, according to ScienceDaily.
"Patient care will always begin and end with the doctor."
Dr. Stephen Kingsmore, the lead author of an article published in Science Translational Medicine, emphasized that even though the algorithm helped guide the treatment strategies of neonatal intensive care physicians, the doctor was still an indispensable link in the chain. "Some people call this artificial intelligence, we call it augmented intelligence," he says. "Patient care will always begin and end with the doctor."
One existing trend is helping to supply a great amount of valuable data to algorithms—the electronic health record. Initially blamed for exacerbating the already crushing workload of many physicians, the EHR is emerging as a boon for algorithms because it consolidates all of a patient's data in one record.
Examples of AI in Action Around the Globe
If you're a parent who has ever taken a child to the doctor with flulike symptoms, you know the anxiety of wondering if the symptoms signal something serious. Kang Zhang, M.D., Ph.D., the founding director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at the University of California at San Diego, and colleagues developed an AI natural language processing model that used deep learning to analyze the EHRs of 1.3 million pediatric visits to a clinic in Guanzhou, China.
The AI identified common childhood diseases with about the same accuracy as human doctors, and it was even able to split the diagnoses into two categories—common conditions such as flu, and serious, life-threatening conditions like meningitis. Zhang has emphasized that the algorithm didn't replace the human doctor, but it did streamline the diagnostic process and could be used in a triage capacity when emergency room personnel need to prioritize the seriously ill over those suffering from common, less dangerous ailments.
AI's usefulness in healthcare ranges far and wide. In Uganda and several other African nations, AI is bringing modern diagnostics to remote villages that have no access to traditional technologies such as x-rays. The New York Times recently reported that there, doctors are using a pocket-sized, hand-held ultrasound machine that works in concert with a cell phone to image and diagnose everything from pneumonia (a common killer of children) to cancerous tumors.
The beauty of the highly portable, battery-powered device is that ultrasound images can be uploaded on computers so that physicians anywhere in the world can review them and weigh in with their advice. And the images are instantly incorporated into the patient's EHR.
Jonathan Rothberg, the founder of Butterfly Network, the Connecticut company that makes the device, told The New York Times that "Two thirds of the world's population gets no imaging at all. When you put something on a chip, the price goes down and you democratize it." The Butterfly ultrasound machine, which sells for $2,000, promises to be a game-changer in remote areas of Africa, South America, and Asia, as well as at the bedsides of patients in developed countries.
AI algorithms are rapidly emerging in healthcare across the U.S. and the world. China has become a major international player, set to surpass the U.S. this year in AI capital investment, the translation of AI research into marketable products, and even the number of often-cited research papers on AI. So far the U.S. is still the leader, but some experts describe the relationship between the U.S. and China as an AI cold war.
"The future of machine learning isn't sentient killer robots. It's longer human lives."
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration expanded its approval of medical algorithms from two in all of 2017 to about two per month throughout 2018. One of the first fields to be impacted is ophthalmology.
One algorithm, developed by the British AI company DeepMind (owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google), instantly scans patients' retinas and is able to diagnose diabetic retinopathy without needing an ophthalmologist to interpret the scans. This means diabetics can get the test every year from their family physician without having to see a specialist. The Financial Times reported in March that the technology is now being used in clinics throughout Europe.
In Copenhagen, emergency service dispatchers are using a new voice-processing AI called Corti to analyze the conversations in emergency phone calls. The algorithm analyzes the verbal cues of callers, searches its huge database of medical information, and provides dispatchers with onscreen diagnostic information. Freddy Lippert, the CEO of EMS Copenhagen, notes that the algorithm has already saved lives by expediting accurate diagnoses in high-pressure situations where time is of the essence.
Researchers at the University of Nottingham in the UK have even developed a deep learning algorithm that predicts death more accurately than human clinicians. The algorithm incorporates data from a huge range of factors in a chronically ill population, including how many fruits and vegetables a patient eats on a daily basis. Dr. Stephen Weng, lead author of the study, published in PLOS ONE, said in a press release, "We found machine learning algorithms were significantly more accurate in predicting death than the standard prediction models developed by a human expert."
New digital technologies are allowing patients to participate in their healthcare as never before. A feature of the new Apple Watch is an app that detects cardiac arrhythmias and even produces an electrocardiogram if an abnormality is detected. The technology, approved by the FDA, is helping cardiologists monitor heart patients and design interventions for those who may be at higher risk of a cardiac event like a stroke.
If having an algorithm predict your death sends a shiver down your spine, consider that algorithms may keep you alive longer. In 2018, technology reporter Tristan Greene wrote for Medium that "…despite the unending deluge of panic-ridden articles declaring AI the path to apocalypse, we're now living in a world where algorithms save lives every day. The future of machine learning isn't sentient killer robots. It's longer human lives."
The Risks of AI Compiling Your Data
To be sure, the advent of AI-infused medical technology is not without its risks. One risk is that the use of AI wearables constantly monitoring our vital signs could turn us into a nation of hypochondriacs, racing to our doctors every time there's a blip in some vital sign. Such a development could stress an already overburdened system that suffers from, among other things, a shortage of doctors and nurses. Another risk has to do with the privacy protections on the massive repository of intimately personal information that AI will have on us.
In an article recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Australian researcher Kit Huckvale and colleagues examined the handling of data by 36 smartphone apps that assisted people with either depression or smoking cessation, two areas that could lend themselves to stigmatization if they fell into the wrong hands.
Out of the 36 apps, 33 shared their data with third parties, despite the fact that just 25 of those apps had a privacy policy at all and out of those, only 23 stated that data would be shared with third parties. The recipients of all that data? It went almost exclusively to Facebook and Google, to be used for advertising and marketing purposes. But there's nothing to stop it from ending up in the hands of insurers, background databases, or any other entity.
Even when data isn't voluntarily shared, any digital information can be hacked. EHRs and even wearable devices share the same vulnerability as any other digital record or device. Still, the promise of AI to radically improve efficiency and accuracy in healthcare is hard to ignore.
AI Can Help Restore Humanity to Medicine
Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute and author of the new book Deep Medicine, says that AI gives doctors and nurses the most precious gift of all: time.
Topol welcomes his patients' use of the Apple Watch cardiac feature and is optimistic about the ways that AI is revolutionizing medicine. He says that the watch helps doctors monitor how well medications are working and has already helped to prevent strokes. But in addition to that, AI will help bring the humanity back to a profession that has become as cold and hard as a stainless steel dissection table.
"When I graduated from medical school in the 1970s," he says, "you had a really intimate relationship with your doctor." Over the decades, he has seen that relationship steadily erode as medical organizations demanded that doctors see more and more patients within ever-shrinking time windows.
"Doctors have no time to think, to communicate. We need to restore the mission in medicine."
In addition to that, EHRs have meant that doctors and nurses are getting buried in paperwork and administrative tasks. This is no doubt one reason why a recent study by the World Health Organization showed that worldwide, about 50 percent of doctors suffer from burnout. People who are utterly exhausted make more mistakes, and medical clinicians are no different from the rest of us. Only medical mistakes have unacceptably high stakes. According to its website, Johns Hopkins University recently announced that in the U.S. alone, 250,000 people die from medical mistakes each year.
"Doctors have no time to think, to communicate," says Topol. "We need to restore the mission in medicine." AI is giving doctors more time to devote to the thing that attracted them to medicine in the first place—connecting deeply with patients.
There is a real danger at this juncture, though, that administrators aware of the time-saving aspects of AI will simply push doctors to see more patients, read more tests, and embrace an even more crushing workload.
"We can't leave it to the administrators to just make things worse," says Topol. "Now is the time for doctors to advocate for a restoration of the human touch. We need to stand up for patients and for the patient-doctor relationship."
AI could indeed be a game changer, he says, but rather than squander the huge benefits of more time, "We need a new equation going forward."
The upcoming vaccine is changing the way we look at treating one of the country’s deadliest cancers.
Last week, researchers at the University of Oxford announced that they have received funding to create a brand new way of preventing ovarian cancer: A vaccine. The vaccine, known as OvarianVax, will teach the immune system to recognize and destroy mutated cells—one of the earliest indicators of ovarian cancer.
Understanding Ovarian Cancer
Despite advancements in medical research and treatment protocols over the last few decades, ovarian cancer still poses a significant threat to women’s health. In the United States alone, more than 12,0000 women die of ovarian cancer each year, and only about half of women diagnosed with ovarian cancer survive five or more years past diagnosis. Unlike cervical cancer, there is no routine screening for ovarian cancer, so it often goes undetected until it has reached advanced stages. Additionally, the primary symptoms of ovarian cancer—frequent urination, bloating, loss of appetite, and abdominal pain—can often be mistaken for other non-cancerous conditions, delaying treatment.
An American woman has roughly a one percent chance of developing ovarian cancer throughout her lifetime. However, these odds increase significantly if she has inherited mutations in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes. Women who carry these mutations face a 46% lifetime risk for ovarian and breast cancers.
An Unlikely Solution
To address this escalating health concern, the organization Cancer Research UK has invested £600,000 over the next three years in research aimed at creating a vaccine, which would destroy cancerous cells before they have a chance to develop any further.
Researchers at the University of Oxford are at the forefront of this initiative. With funding from Cancer Research UK, scientists will use tissue samples from the ovaries and fallopian tubes of patients currently battling ovarian cancer. Using these samples, University of Oxford scientists will create a vaccine to recognize certain proteins on the surface of ovarian cancer cells known as tumor-associated antigens. The vaccine will then train that person’s immune system to recognize the cancer markers and destroy them.
The next step
Once developed, the vaccine will first be tested in patients with the disease, to see if their ovarian tumors will shrink or disappear. Then, the vaccine will be tested in women with the BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations as well as women in the general population without genetic mutations, to see whether the vaccine can prevent the cancer altogether.
While the vaccine still has “a long way to go,” according to Professor Ahmed Ahmed, Director of Oxford University’s ovarian cancer cell laboratory, he is “optimistic” about the results.
“We need better strategies to prevent ovarian cancer,” said Ahmed in a press release from the University of Oxford. “Currently, women with BRCA1/2 mutations are offered surgery which prevents cancer but robs them of the chance to have children afterward.
Teaching the immune system to recognize the very early signs of cancer is a tough challenge. But we now have highly sophisticated tools which give us real insights into how the immune system recognizes ovarian cancer. OvarianVax could offer the solution.”
How sharing, hearing, and remembering positive stories can help shape our brains for the better
Across cultures and through millennia, human beings have always told stories. Whether it’s a group of boy scouts around a campfire sharing ghost stories or the paleolithic Cro-Magnons etching pictures of bison on cave walls, researchers believe that storytelling has been universal to human beings since the development of language.
But storytelling was more than just a way for our ancestors to pass the time. Researchers believe that storytelling served an important evolutionary purpose, helping humans learn empathy, share important information (such as where predators were or what berries were safe to eat), as well as strengthen social bonds. Quite literally, storytelling has made it possible for the human race to survive.
Today, neuroscientists are discovering that storytelling is just as important now as it was millions of years ago. Particularly in sharing positive stories, humans can more easily form relational bonds, develop a more flexible perspective, and actually grow new brain circuitry that helps us survive. Here’s how.
How sharing stories positively impacts the brain
When human beings share stories, it increases the levels of certain neurochemicals in the brain, neuroscientists have found. In a 2021 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Swedish researchers found that simply hearing a story could make hospitalized children feel better, compared to other hospitalized children who played a riddle game for the same amount of time. In their research, children in the intensive care unit who heard stories for just 30 minutes had higher levels of oxytocin, a hormone that promotes positive feelings and is linked to relaxation, trust, social connectedness, and overall psychological stability. Furthermore, the same children showed lower levels of cortisol, a hormone associated with stress. Afterward, the group of children who heard stories tended to describe their hospital experiences more positively, and even reported lower levels of pain.
Annie Brewster, MD, knows the positive effect of storytelling from personal experience. An assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the author of The Healing Power of Storytelling: Using Personal Narrative to Navigate Illness, Trauma, and Loss, Brewster started sharing her personal experience with chronic illness after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2001. In doing so, Brewster says it has enabled her to accept her diagnosis and integrate it into her identity. Brewster believes so much in the power of hearing and sharing stories that in 2013 she founded Health Story Collaborative, a forum for others to share their mental and physical health challenges.“I wanted to hear stories of people who had found ways to move forward in positive ways, in spite of health challenges,” Brewster said. In doing so, Brewster believes people with chronic conditions can “move closer to self-acceptance and self-love.”
While hearing and sharing positive stories has been shown to increase oxytocin and other “feel good” chemicals, simply remembering a positive story has an effect on our brains as well. Mark Hoelterhoff, PhD, a lecturer in clinical psychology at the University of Edinburgh, recalling and “savoring” a positive story, thought, or feedback “begins to create new brain circuitry—a new neural network that’s geared toward looking for the positive,” he says. Over time, other research shows, savoring positive stories or thoughts can literally change the shape of your brain, hard-wiring someone to see things in a more positive light.How stories can change your behavior
In 2009, Paul Zak, PhD, a neuroscientist and professor at Claremont Graduate University, set out to measure how storytelling can actually change human behavior for the better. In his study, Zak wanted to measure the behavioral effects of oxytocin, and did this by showing test subjects two short video clips designed to elicit an emotional response.
In the first video they showed the study participants, a father spoke to the camera about his two-year-old son, Ben, who had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. The father told the audience that he struggled to connect with and enjoy Ben, as Ben had only a few months left to live. In the end, the father finds the strength to stay emotionally connected to his son until he dies.
The second video clip, however, was much less emotional. In that clip, the same father and son are shown spending the day at the zoo. Ben is only suggested to have cancer (he is bald from chemotherapy and referred to as a ‘miracle’, but the cancer isn’t mentioned directly). The second story lacked the dramatic narrative arc of the first video.
Zak’s team took blood before and after the participants watched one of the two videos and found that the first story increased the viewers’ cortisol and oxytocin, suggesting that they felt distress over the boy’s diagnosis and empathy toward the boy and his father. The second narrative, however, didn’t increase oxytocin or cortisol at all.
But Zak took the experiment a step further. After the movie clips, his team gave the study participants a chance to share money with a stranger in the lab. The participants who had an increase in cortisol and oxytocin were more likely to donate money generously. The participants who had increased cortisol and oxytocin were also more likely to donate money to a charity that works with children who are ill. Zak also found that the amount of oxytocin that was released was correlated with how much money people felt comfortable giving—in other words, the more oxytocin that was released, the more generous they felt, and the more money they donated.
How storytelling strengthens our bond with others
Sharing, hearing, and remembering stories can be a powerful tool for social change–not only in the way it changes our brain and our behavior, but also because it can positively affect our relationships with other people
Emotional stimulation from telling stories, writes Zak, is the foundation for empathy, and empathy strengthens our relationships with other people. “By knowing someone’s story—where they come from, what they do, and who you might know in common—relationships with strangers are formed.”
But why are these relationships important for humanity? Because human beings can use storytelling to build empathy and form relationships, it enables them to “engage in the kinds of large-scale cooperation that builds massive bridges and sends humans into space,” says Zak.
Storytelling, Zak found, and the oxytocin release that follows, also makes people more sensitive to social cues. This sensitivity not only motivates us to form relationships, but also to engage with other people and offer help, particularly if the other person seems to need help.
But as Zak found in his experiments, the type of storytelling matters when it comes to affecting relationships. Where Zak found that storytelling with a dramatic arc helps release oxytocin and cortisol, enabling people to feel more empathic and generous, other researchers have found that sharing happy stories allows for greater closeness between individuals and speakers. A group of Chinese researchers found that, compared to emotionally-neutral stories, happy stories were more “emotionally contagious.” Test subjects who heard happy stories had greater activation in certain areas of their brains, experienced more significant, positive changes in their mood, and felt a greater sense of closeness between themselves and the speaker.
“This finding suggests that when individuals are happy, they become less self-focused and then feel more intimate with others,” the authors of the study wrote. “Therefore, sharing happiness could strengthen interpersonal bonding.” The researchers went on to say that this could lead to developing better social networks, receiving more social support, and leading more successful social lives.
Since the start of the COVID pandemic, social isolation, loneliness, and resulting mental health issues have only gotten worse. In light of this, it’s safe to say that hearing, sharing, and remembering stories isn’t just something we can do for entertainment. Storytelling has always been central to the human experience, and now more than ever it’s become something crucial for our survival.
Want to know how you can reap the benefits of hearing happy stories? Keep an eye out for Upworthy’s first book, GOOD PEOPLE: Stories from the Best of Humanity, published by National Geographic/Disney, available on September 3, 2024. GOOD PEOPLE is a much-needed trove of life-affirming stories told straight from the heart. Handpicked from Upworthy’s community, these 101 stories speak to the breadth, depth, and beauty of the human experience, reminding us we have a lot more in common than we realize.