AI Articles and Analysis in Healthcare

Event Title: Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Decision Science in Health and Nutrition

Event Host: the World Bank Group

According to Deloitte and the Economist, global annual health spending should reach $8.734 trillion dollars by 2020, and, as mentioned in our previous report on AI for Healthcare in Asia, InkWood Research estimated the size of the artificial intelligence market in the healthcare industry at around $1.21 billion in 2016. As of now, numerous AI vendors claim to help healthcare professionals diagnose patients using machine vision. Other AI vendors claim to offer solutions for increasing adherence to drug therapy programs.

It should come as no surprise that AI has found its way into radiology in a similar fashion to most other medical fields. Many AI vendors selling into the radiology field are just beginning to gain regulatory approval. We researched the use of AI in radiology to better understand where AI comes into play in the industry and to answer the following questions:

International Data Corporation reports that the global wearables market continued to grow in the second quarter of 2018 as shipments reached 27.9 million units, an increase of 5.5% year-on-year. This growth translated to $4.8 billion year-on-year for the quarter. Smartwatches continued to be the most popular wearables.

Several factors have contributed to the advancement of AI in the pharmaceutical industry. These factors include the increase in the size of and the greater variety of types of biomedical datasets, as a result of the increased usage of electronic health records.

The clinical trial is a foundational pillar of the pharmaceutical drug discovery process. Essentially, clinical trials are research studies which seek to determine if a medical treatment or device is safe and effective for humans. While the pharmaceutical drug industry has experienced some fluctuations it remains a profitable market. Global prescription drug expenditures are estimated to reach nearly $1.5 trillion by 2021 according to Quintiles IMS Holding.  

Before getting into this report, we have to inform readers that none of the companies discussed below claim to offer software that provides diagnostics, except Cognoa, which has FDA approval to call itself a diagnostic tool. We suspect this is because these companies are not legally allowed to do so. We usually don't refer to a dictionary to determine what constitutes a concept, preferring to create our own informed definitions, such as in our What is Machine Learning? piece, but Merriam Webster defines "diagnosis" as the following: "the art or act of identifying a disease from its signs and symptoms."

The healthcare domain seems ripe for disruption by way of artificial intelligence in the form of predictive analytics. Accenture estimates the AI in healthcare market will reach $6.6 billion by 2021.