‘India can leap ahead with AI in healthcare’

New Delhi, April 3 (IANS) India has a unique opportunity to leap ahead with Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare, as well as to bring the powers of cloud and AI to the broader world, a top Microsoft executive said on Wednesday.

According to Peter Lee, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Healthcare, India has a well-laid infrastructure and advanced technology base, which "is an important crucible for innovation and healthcare".

"There is an opportunity here in India, that's unique in the world, to leap ahead by designing systems for the service of people to enable better reach for healthcare in rural parts of India and to bring the powers of cloud and AI to the broader world," Lee said.

He stated that new ideas, such as using predictive analytics to detect people at risk of cardiac disease early, or to predict onset of blindness due to uncorrected refractive error in kids, are taking root in India, and can be beneficial for even the most far off world communities.

AI has been increasingly seen as a magic pill that can solve any disease for which there is no cure yet.

Besides providing doctors and nurses with new user experiences, AI has a tremendous potential in precision medicine. It can also make healthcare more accessible and affordable for people in the remotest of areas, Lee said.

"Hope around AI is justified because the advances we have been making in areas like deep learning and reinforcement learning have been spectacular, outstripping even our optimistic projections," he added.

While privacy of healthcare remains a big issue globally, Microsoft does not own the data but instead provides it as a foundation to create models that would be in the service of our customers, Lee said.

"At Microsoft, we take privacy so seriously that our attention to data compliance regulations is absolutely the best in the industry," he added.