Emergence Of Licensed Robot Doctor [AI in medicine]

How comfortable will you feel when you know that a robot is going to be the one treating you in the hospital, or possibly performing surgery on you? have you ever thought about the possibilities of robots as doctors? Well, I think the era is already here with us. I present to you the future of Robot Medic; Xiaoyi.

People have argued that the basis of qualifying an AI (artificial intelligence) to be really intelligent is if it passes certain exams on the cognitive domain of humans. Clearly, Xiaoyi has left the world of AI in awe, as it passes China's National Medical Licensing Examination.

The pass mark of the aforementioned exam was pegged at 360, but Xiaoyi got 456 points, beating some humans to it (I know the people will feel so bad, having been beaten by machine in medical exam). I would also like to state that this is the first time an AI would pass any medical licensing examination.

The world hasn't fully recovered from standing in the awe of Sophia the robot (first humanoid robot to be granted citizenship. You can get the post here), now we're seeing AI entering the field of medicine.

Xiaoyi was developed as a medical robot, and also to work in capturing and analysing information from patients. It was developed by iFlytek (a Chinese AI giant). From the report gotten from iFlytek, the future of the robot in medicine is very certain.

Xiaoyi has relative medical knowledge to become a licensed medical practitioner - Liu Qingfeng (chairman of iFlytek)

The future of AI in medicine

With the trend of robotic evolution, permit me to say that we're on the edge of a major revolution in the field of medicine. We could have robot surgeons that would perform complicated surgeries with dead-eye accuracy in the nearest future.

Before the invent of iFlytek's Xiaoyi, there have been other advances in the field of medical robots. Like the IBM's Watson (it helped in the diagnosis of cancer in patients), Alexa (a medical virtual assistant), Google's DeepMind AI (also a medical virtual assistant). But clearly, Xiaoyi is the first fully independent medical robot with surpassing human cognition.

We think we've seen enough right? Not yet though. The Chairman of iFlytek has announced that Xiaoyi assistant doctor (Dr. Xiaoyi, actually) will be launched in march 2018.

Will this replace humans doctors?

The creators of Xiaoyi have emphatically stated that this is not meant to replace human doctors, but to compliment human doctors, and to improve the effectiveness and ease of treatment in the future. So I guess this has ruled off the fears in the hearts of human medical practitioners on losing their jobs to AI.

But the questions that should also be considered are:

• How acceptable will this robotic doctors be in the human community?
• Will humans feel comfortable when they're sent to robotic doctors for treatment?
  Well, let's just wait for the full unleashing in march 2018. I guess the questions will be answered by then.

Tech Rules!!

Thanks for reading

Image Sources:Img1, Img2
References for further reading:: Ref1, Ref2, Ref3

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