Todor Primov, life sciences product manager at Ontotext, discusses some of the ways artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the face of healthcare.
A common joke among certain circles is that AI can be defined as “whatever we haven’t done yet”. While the current popularity of AI among investors, startups and the wider media is unparalleled, we need to retain focus on what exactly AI means, and its specific sector-based applications.
In healthcare and pharmaceutical research, ‘AI-like’ technologies hold huge promise, but what are the problems these solutions are purporting to solve, and where are the business opportunities?
Sheer data volume
Data volume is a problem in the healthcare sector too. A recently published scientific paper highlights the scale of the problem that medical researchers face on a regular basis: scientists sifted through the genetic sequences of nearly 600,000 adults in order to find the genes of just 13 people who were resistant to a particular strain of disease. As the article notes, in the future 600,000 data points may not be enough to isolate a potential cure: researchers will need millions....