Experts predict future medicine more personal with AI supported

2019-11-08 16:05:20 Xinhua Xinhua

World-class experts foresee that the healthcare in the future would be more personalized and artificial intelligence (AI) supported during a medicine conference in Israel.

Around 1,000 participants from around the world, including three Nobel laureates Robert J. Oman, Avram Hershko and Ada Yonat, have attended the conference which took place on Monday and Tuesday in the city of Tel Aviv.

Inventions and Innovations - Medicine 2040: Rewriting the Future of Healthcare (INI) was the name of the event.

"The most important thing in medicine is trying to find diseases at an early stage, and even try to prevent them at all," Nadir Arber said in an interview with Xinhua.

He manages the surgery unit at Surasky Tel Aviv medical center and serves as chair of Jersey-Elias Institute, Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University.

Speakers at the convention spoke greatly about the future abilities of the medicine to prevent illnesses by using cutting edge technology.

It is predicted to be much easier to do the constant checking for possible health issues with a simple blood or other fast tests, people would come for a few minutes to check themselves and continue their day.

Although the technology could become more effective than the human doctors, it is still far away from the day when doctors would be replaced by robots.

The human body is a very complicated structure, and the understanding of the functions of each neuron in a brain will not give the full picture of how all of them work and synergize together, said Arber.

Ronni Gamzu, director-general of Tel Aviv Sourasky medical center and former director-general of the Israeli Ministry of Health, said that "medicine is facing a lot of challenges."

Demography, life expectancy, chronic diseases, shortage of healthcare workers, and high-cost healthcare technologies are among the current problems.

Gamzu thought the future medicine would be with much more artificial intelligence and big data of patients analyzed for better treatment.

"Personalized treatment will be based and customed to specific genetics, phenotypes, genotypes, and molecules of each patient. We will tailor the treatment for each patient, understanding what is the best for any individual," Gamzu told Xinhua.

Future healthcare would cost more, and maybe the country should increase the health budget for better health of its people, according to Gamzu.

Despite the cutting-edge technology, Gamzu believes doctors would always have the final call and the computers will be a good assistant that might sometimes take its own small decisions but not more than that.

Nobel prize laureate Avram Hershko said in an interview with Xinhua that the technology would continue to involve with telemedicine and more personalized medicine would help cancer patients as well as others.

Personalized medicine based on DNA would be affordable, stressed Hershko, adding that "DNA sequencing used to cost millions of U.S. dollars, but now, sequencing the whole genome costs only 1,000 dollars."

Hershko was optimistic about the future containment and partial eradication of diseases as cancer and finding of new antibiotics to fight the resistant bacteria.

Adi Ben-Nasher, a digital architect at Microsoft services, told Xinhua that "the healthcare industry is transforming. The future healthcare and medicine would be unbounded."

Nasher predicts a future where tech giant companies would take a bigger role in providing technology-based healthcare, medicine which would be much better thanks to artificial intelligence.

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