The invention of digital pathology helped transform healthcare and aid in primary diagnosis, intra-operative diagnosis and more. It helps both on the research level and the patient to doctor level.
It’s used in education, web consultations and drug development. There are few areas of medicine where digital pathology has not had an impact. The intervention of artificial intelligence into digital pathology also has revolutionary implications.
While still in the early stages, the growing role of artificial intelligence promises to take digital pathology to the next level. Check out the ways AI will have an impact on digital pathology.
Faster Diagnosis for Digital Pathology
Digital pathology still requires someone to identify the problem in the slides. It creates a large number of slides and data.
It takes hours to weed through them and find the impacted area. Google recently created an artificial intelligence algorithm that can detect metastatic breast cancer on digital slides 99 percent of the time.
Oncologists can run the digital slides through a special program and receive diagnosis information almost immediately. The faster a patient receives a diagnosis, the faster they can receive treatment. With cancer, time is of the essence, so a faster diagnosis can save lives.
AI Gives Doctor’s More Time with Patients
With artificial intelligence helping manage the endless images and help identify issues, doctors can spend more time helping patients. Many patients feel hurried in doctor’s appointments because doctors are rushed from one patient to the other.
With AI helping, doctors can slow down because they’re not spending so much time reviewing slides. Doctors can spend less time with people who have little or no issues and instead provide more care to those abnormal and more serious cases.
AI is a boon to doctors and patients by decreasing the number of time specialists need to spend reviewing biopsies and other tests.
AI Helps Develop Personalized Treatments
Cancer is difficult to diagnose and treat because there are so many different types. While it may be one type of cancer, how it is treated and how it spreads are different from person to person. With AI able to analyze large amounts of data fast, they can find and diagnose the type of cancer.
Doctors can create a personalized treatment plan from the very beginning. They don’t have to wait until they can diagnose the specific type of cancer and use generic stop-gap measures in the meantime.
Doctors are more informed from the beginning and can develop specialized treatments that can improve the chances of survival.
Pathology Improves with Use of AI
There’s no doubt that digital pathology has helped improve the lives of doctors and patients. The advance has come with a few obstacles including a large amount of data used to create the slides. Doctors need help managing and examining the slides and artificial intelligence can do that.
As AI improves, its role in digital pathology will increase. If you want to learn more about digital pathology and our telepathology solutions, contact us today.
