Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVISIs AI revolutionizing healthcare?
Fraunhofer workshop adresses the transformative potential of AI in healthcare at the Curious Future Insight Conference 2024
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Fraunhofer workshop on the potential of AI at the Curious Future Insight Conference 2024
On July 10, 2024, at the Curious Future Insight Conference, experts from science and industry discussed the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in health research in a workshop organized by Fraunhofer Health. The biennial conference with over 2,000 participants highlights societal challenges from the perspectives of science, technology and innovation.
In such context the focus increasingly lies on healthcare and the pressured healthcare system: During the Fraunhofer workshop “Potentials of AI to Transform Precision Medicine”, the participants discussed the ways in which AI might transform healthcare and identified the challenges that limit the implementation and application of new technologies. The experts examined the topic from various perspectives: Katrien Grünberg (Head of the Department and Professor of Pathology Radboudumc), Ralf Kuhlen (Chief Medical Officer Helios Health), Fabien Gaire (Head of imaging portfolio Roche Pharma Development Datascience) and Stefan Wrobel (Director of Fraunhofer IAIS and Professor of Computer Science) provided introductory impulses and then engaged in a lively discussion with all participants. The workshop was moderated by Horst Hahn, Director of Fraunhofer MEVIS, and Dieter Fellner, Director of Fraunhofer IGD.
The experts illustrated their key points with the powerful example of Digital Pathology, because, thanks to AI, image analyses are becoming more efficient and precise. In the future, new technologies could take over some tasks usually done by humans, such as annotation and comparison of images. The integration of additional data and the identification of hidden patterns make it probable that diseases will be recognized at an earlier stage or even prevented through timely intervention. The automated processing of complex data sets will also increasingly enable individualized therapies.
The Fraunhofer workshop revealed that there are several impediments to realize this promising vision. Oftentimes, data are unavailable or their usage for research purposes restricted; there is a lack of digital infrastructure and diverse data. Attempting to solve this, initiatives such as the bigpicture project, co-led by Katrien Grünberg, make data available within the scientific community. However, to turn AI into a successful and safe tool that contributes to better healthcare, technology and health industries, health providers, regulators and patients must work together.
To ensure an appropriate standard of healthcare while expenditures are rising and resources dwindling, new ways and incentives for a sustainable and affordable healthcare system are required. This is a major task – and digitalization is certainly part of the solution. “AI needs pioneers and multidisciplinary teams to prioritize measures and shape the future together,” emphasized Horst Hahn.
Links
Curious Future Insight Conference
News from AI health research at the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft