Artificial intelligence is proving it can spot the warning signs of disease before we even know we are ill ourselves. Leah Kaminsky, a GP and author, believes it could lead to a new era of healthcare.
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It was a sunny day outside, with a hint of spring in the air. I followed Angela, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, down the corridor towards my consulting room in Melbourne. She’d been my patient for several years, but that morning I noticed her shuffling her feet a little as she walked. Her facial expression seemed a bit flat and I noticed she had a mild tremor.
I referred her to a neurologist and within a week she was commenced on treatment for Parkinson’s disease, but I kicked myself for not picking up on her symptoms sooner.
Sadly, this is a common situation for patients all over the world. They are only diagnosed once they begin to show noticeable signs of illness, the body’s warning signal to doctors that something is wrong. If only disease could be spotted earlier, patients might have a chance of receiving early treatment, with even the possibility of their condition being halted before it begins to set in. New technology is beginning to offer some hope.
With the help of artificial intelligence, patients and doctors could be alerted to potential changes in their health months, or even years, before symptoms appear.
Futurist Ross Dawson, founder of the Future Exploration Network, predicts a shift from the current model of remedial “sick-care” to a new healthcare ecosystem, focused more on prevention and the tracking of potential health problems before they have a chance to develop.
Our facial features can betray subtle information about certain rare genetic disorders, which machine learning is helping doctors to identify (Credit: Face2gene/FDNA)
“Shifting societal attitudes, with increased expectations to live full and healthy lives, are driving these changes,” he says. “This decade, the explosion of new technology and algorithms has given rise to deep learning in artificial intelligence, becoming vastly more effective at pattern recognition than humans.”
These systems can discern patterns that are invisible to the human eye, revealing surprising aspects of how our bodies betray our future health
By harnessing AI to track our heart rate, breathing, movement and even chemicals in our breath, the technology has the ability to detect potential health problems at an individual level long before obvious symptoms appear. This could help doctors to intervene or allow patients to change their lifestyle to allay or prevent illness.
Perhaps most excitingly, these systems can discern patterns that are invisible to the human eye, revealing surprising aspects of how our bodies betray our future health.
This ability to look for changes in the daily behaviour of patients can provide early clues of something being wrong, perhaps before they even know it themselves.
Many of us already utilise a myriad of gadgets to self-monitor everything from our calorie intake to the number of steps we take each day. Artificial intelligence can play a vital role in helping make sense of all this information.
“More and more elderly people are living alone, burdened by chronic disease, which leads to enormous safety concerns,” says Katabi. She believes her device will allow medical professionals to intervene sooner and potentially ward off medical emergencies.
Face value
Artificial intelligence could also use the way we look to help us predict future disease. New research suggests it can pick up on subtle differences in our faces that might be the hallmarks of disease.
FDNA, a Boston-based startup, has developed an app called Face2Gene that uses something it calls “deep phenotyping” to identify possible genetic diseases from a patient’s facial features. It uses an AI technique known as deep learning, teaching its algorithms to spot facial features and shapes that are typically found in rare genetic disorders such Noonan Syndrome.
The algorithm was trained by feeding it with more than 17,000 photographs of patients affected by one of 216 different genetic conditions. In some of these disorders the patients develop certain facial hallmarks of their condition, such as in Bain-type intellectual disability, where children have characteristic almond-shaped eyes and small chins. FDNA’s algorithm has learned to recognise these distinctive facial patterns that are often undetectable to human doctors.
Doctors will rarely spot diseases in patients who are not showing symptoms, but harnessing technology like AI could allow them to treat problems earlier.
Early diagnosis of rare genetic syndromes like these means that medical treatments can be delivered more promptly – while sparing families the diagnostic odyssey that identifying these conditions often involves.
With rare diseases affecting an estimated 10% of the world’s population, AI tools such as these are likely to change the face of medicine.
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