Srinagar, Mar 18: The District Hospital Shopian has enhanced its radiology services using Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, bringing the hospital to par with other leading healthcare institutions in the Union Territory.
Last year, the DH Shopian became the first hospital in the Kashmir division to implement AI technology in its radiology department.
“Since the introduction of AI technology, some 1300 radio diagnoses of patients were done in the past seven months. It has benefitted the patients of Shopian,” said Shamim Ahmad, a Senior Technician at the hospital.
He said the facility has helped the patients and they get instant reports of the diagnostics. “It has helped to detect the malignancies on time like tuberculosis and other diseases,” he said.
The technological intervention was done under the Directorate of Health Services Kashmir as a pilot project for Quick X-ray (Qxr), utilizing AI tools for more efficient diagnoses.
Chief Medical Officer, Shopian, Dr Arshid Hussain Tak said they are also using the computers and latest digital technology in the CT Scan which has come as a relief for patients. “AI is now everything and there have been developments and interventions. Maybe in future, we may use AI in the USG. We were the first to use it in radiology,” he said.
The innovative approach allows instant identification of abnormal areas in X-rays with an accuracy of over 90 percent, greatly facilitating the final diagnosis process for radiologists.
Medical Superintendent, DH Shopian, Dr Rubina Maqbool said the introduction of artificial intelligence tools has made the final diagnosis easier for radiologists. “AI has been revolutionising the medical domain for intelligent computing which aims to solve practical healthcare problems. Advanced techniques like deep learning have maximized the impact of technology in healthcare, particularly the use of AI in radiology that uses radiation to generate medical imaging, e.g. X-ray to detect deformities,” she said.
She said radiology generates a lot of clinical image data and radiologists must spend hours sorting through these images, writing analyses, and finalising the diagnosis. “But medical images can also be processed and analysed by computer vision (CV) – a specialised field of Artificial Intelligence to predict diseases accurately. Introducing AI at DH Shopian has brought several benefits for radiologists,” the MS said.
AI in healthcare is an overarching term used to describe the use of machine-learning algorithms and software, or AI to mimic human cognition in the analysis, presentation, and comprehension of complex medical and healthcare data, or to exceed human capabilities by providing new ways to diagnose, treat, or prevent disease, Dr Rubina said.
