HOW COMPUTER VISION ENHANCES HEALTHCARE

A second set of digital eyes to help providers.

As much as digital technology has radically altered the field of medicine, the profession is still primarily analog. What does this mean? While medical computers and medical tablets can help practitioners pull up medical records with a few taps of the finger, they can’t tell you if the dark spot on a mammogram is something to worry about.

Fortunately, recent advancements in computer vision have given providers a second set of digital eyes. This enhances care for millions of patients around the world.

Computer Vision: What is It?

A normal computer can display images or videos, but it cannot “understand” what’s on display. The image is just an array of colored pixels.

The goal of computer vision is for computers to process and analyze visual data in much the same way the human brain does. For instance, a computer depicting a video of a dog playing in grass. Computer vision takes the pixel data from that video, analyzes it, and uses it to tell that the dog is a distinct object separate from the grass. Sufficiently advanced computer vision programs would even be able to identify that the dog is a dog, not just a moving object.

The technology has already become a familiar part of our everyday experience with technology. Facial recognition technology for example is a form of computer vision. When you post a picture of you and your friends on social media, and it accurately identifies your friends in the photos and suggests you tag them, that’s computer vision in action. Even those “Captchas” people have to fill out to sign up for websites are an example. Filling them out helps the program more accurately identify letters and objects in photos.

Computer Vision and Medicine

Providers and nurses rely on their sight every day. Yet even the most skilled providers make mistakes, and until recently, it would take another provider to catch them. But, thanks to computer vision, things are changing for the better.

Covered below are four ways computer vision enhances care for millions of patients:

Medical Imaging and Cancer Detection

COVID-19 Detection and Prevention

Managing Patient Flow

Patient Monitoring

Medical Imaging and Cancer Detection

Accurate diagnosis is often quite literally a matter of life and death. Computer vision can improve the odds for the former. The technology can take an MRI, X-Ray, mammogram, sonogram, etc., analyze it, and identify potential problems before the image is displayed on the screen.

This is particularly valuable to oncologists and radiologists. Computer vision often catches cancerous growths in diagnostic images well before their human counterparts. Given how critical early diagnosis is to a good prognosis, computer vision’s ability to more accurately diagnose cancer than highly trained doctors means the technology is capable of saving countless lives.

COVID-19 Detection and Prevention

PCR tests used to detect COVID-19 are still the gold standard. Unfortunately, the results can sometimes take days to receive. Rapid tests are available, but they produce more false results than PCR. Practitioners need other ways to diagnose patients for the disease.

That’s where computer vision comes in. Computer vision applications have been shown to diagnose COVID-19 based on digital chest x-rays with greater accuracy than many rapid COVID tests.

Computer vision can even help medical facilities enforce COVID-19 safety protocols. Cameras can monitor the distance between patients in the waiting room. Or monitor security camera footage to identify and locate anyone in the facility who is not wearing a mask. An alert can then be sent to a nearby staff member’s medical tablet if anyone breaks those rules.

Managing Patient Flow

Hospitals need to move patients through the system as efficiently as possible. After all, long lines, excessive wait times, and empty beds can cost lives.

Computer vision can help. It can be used to track which beds are occupied. It will then alert the nearby staff on their medical tablets when a bed becomes available. That way, beds don’t sit empty when such space is at a premium.

Patient Monitoring

Patient falls are among the most serious dangers people face in hospitals. Hundreds of thousands of incidents happen each year.

Prior to the pandemic, many facilities would have staff members take shifts sitting in people’s rooms to monitor them so they don’t fall. But with healthcare staffing resources spread thin during the pandemic, many hospitals have turned to computer vision. When the system detects a patient has fallen, it alerts the nearest staff member to come to tend to the situation. This frees up staff to tend to other patients while not sacrificing care.

The Bottom Line

If you're interested in finding out how medical computers and tablets using computer vision can enhance care at your hospital or healthcare group, contact the experts at Cybernet today!