Artificial intelligence has the potential to drive a revolution in health and wellness, but there are some hurdles that need to be ironed out first.
This was the message delivered at the East Tech West roundtable at the Viva Technology conference in Paris.
There, Alibaba Group’s president of strategic development, Chris Tang, and FemHealth Insights CEO Brittany Barrett joined CNBC’s senior tech correspondent, Arjun Karpal, to discuss the potential and limitations of AI.
“Using AI we could literally cure breast cancer,” Barrett said, referring to an algorithm that can predict a woman’s five-year risk of breast cancer.
“The radiologist looked at it and said, ‘You don’t have breast cancer. You’re healthy.’ The AI said, ‘We think you’ll get breast cancer within the next two to three years.’ This was a game changer, because breast cancer is curable if it’s caught at stage 1.”
Dong said similar developments are happening in China, where AI is helping speed up the diagnostic process.
“We (Alibaba) are helping doctors in three hospitals in Hangzhou province diagnose possible tumors with CT scans, and we’ve found that on average, it takes the machine just three seconds to make a diagnosis, so it actually saves doctors time to look more closely at other things.”
But Tung says the biggest opportunity in AI will come from personalization.
“People are treated equally, but we are all created differently. Everyone has their own needs that need to be looked after, whether it’s physical health or mental health. If you only focus on general intelligence, it’s about building capabilities, not looking after the individual,” he said.
Unfortunately, Barrett and Tan say data bias prevents true personalization from happening.
“To actually get to personalization, you have to factor sex and gender into the algorithm,” Barrett said.
“Fair representation in the dataset is very important, not just from gender but from different cultures, different backgrounds and different regions,” Tung added.
Watch the video above to see the full East Tech West roundtable, where panelists also discuss why AI is finally becoming mainstream and the importance of data protection.
