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But indicators of what is to come are here today, and many patients
around the world are already seeing results.
AI has the unique ability to filter through reams of data so vast that a human being could not possibly
find a meaningful pattern. Perhaps the most powerful use of this technology will be in the field of
healthcare monitoring and disease prevention.
With wearable healthcare monitoring devices becoming more commonplace, patients are entering an
era where real-time healthcare data can introduce sweeping changes to how we understand disease
development.
Instead of drawing conclusions based on incomplete sets of data gathered from clinical trials, artificially
intelligent engines can spot patterns in entire populations.
This could lead to advances in preventing some of the most tenacious and difficult-to-predict diseases
of the modern era – Diabetes, Cancer, Parkinson’s Disease, and more. So far, predicting the onset of
these diseases with any degree of certainty has eluded researchers.
Exciting Potential for AI in Drug Discovery
For another perspective on how AI is transforming the healthcare industry, it’s helpful to look at the
pharmaceutical sector. Discovering drugs is traditionally a difficult, arduous, and exorbitantly expensive
endeavor. Bringing a single new drug to market costs about $2.6 billion.
The reasons are myriad – individual human chemists need to sift through dozens of thousands of chemical
compounds to search for a few that seem to have promising pharmaceutical properties. Of those few
compounds, fewer still will be selected for further research. A handful of those compounds will eventually be
tested in human clinical trials, and a small fraction of those drugs will successfully obtain approval.