What is DeepMind? DeepMind is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) company founded in 2010 in the U.K. DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014. The majority of readers know DeepMind from the famous AlphaGo program that beat the world’s best Go player for the first time. However, DeepMind is said to be also currently working on health-care focused projects that can help in detecting and diagnosing diseases in the early stages.
‘DeepMind and Streams’
DeepMind has developed an application called ‘Streams’, which is aimed at solving the problem of “failure to rescue” where the right health-care professionals do not succeed in treating the patient in time. Streams aims to solve this problem, by providing a system which can immediately process test results. In the case that an issue is found, a notification is sent to alert the health-care professional to help, together with further information regarding the patient. Streams does this by using different types of data and test results from existing IT systems in the respective hospital. Streams has witnessed a lot of success, as nurses say it saves them up to ‘two hours a day’, and patients claiming to have been attended to faster.
‘Streams and Sensitive Data’
However, Google/DeepMind has been under a lot of scrutiny due to Streams. Powles & Hodson (2017) imply that sensitive medical information has been mishandled. As mentioned earlier, Streams relies on existing information from patients to make early diagnoses. However, Streams has access to 1.6 million medical records, and this information was delivered by the National Health Service (NHS) in the U.K. through a data-sharing agreement signed in 2015. Within these medical records lie data that is irrelevant to some of Streams’ services, but critical to patients’ privacy. Therefore, some claim that access to unnecessary data should be restricted.
We know that data plays an important role in the development of A.I such as DeepMind (Machine Learning). But to what extent can A.I be implemented in health-care? How can sensitive data regarding patient’s medical records be properly handled and analyzed? Will we see more A.I in healthcare in the future, and what kind?
Sources:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/08/08/the-amazing-ways-how-google-uses-deep-learning-ai/2/#50020b4d35e4
https://deepmind.com/applied/deepmind-health/about-deepmind-health/
https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/16/14932764/deepmind-google-uk-nhs-health-data-analysis
Powles, J., & Hodson, H. (2017). Google DeepMind and healthcare in an age of algorithms. Health and Technology, 1-17.
Deniz Ozer