With a lot of trumped-up doom and gloom surrounding AI, it’s important to appreciate the significant improvements to our lives that AI has brought us.

You might remember the super AI called Watson (by IBM) that was able to defeat the world’s best Jeopardy! players. Besides trouncing some of the world’s brightest trivia stars, Watson was also touted as the solution to highly accurate cancer detection; this was back in 2013. Since then, Watson’s former business chief, Manoj Saxena, claimed that 90% of nurses in the field now follow Watson’s guidance.

However, a STAT investigation discovered that Watson wasn’t living up to these incredible claims. Indeed, in a world where AI is literally getting better every day, five-year-old technology soon becomes outmoded without sufficient overhauls. This is where a brilliant study from Yokohama, Japan, comes into the equation. In October 2017, the research team devised an AI program that could detect colorectal cancer before benign tumors could even become malignant. They were able to achieve this with an accuracy of 86%.

The AI program magnified a colorectal polyp to the tune of 500 times, making note of even the subtlest variations. Next, the deep-learning program cross-referenced the batch of variations against more than 30,000 images of both precancerous and cancerous cells; these were used to train the program via a deep-learning algorithm. Owing to such an extensive knowledge base, the cutting-edge AI could make a highly accurate prediction in less than a second.

What makes this especially important is how the technology can stop cancer in its tracks before it has the chance to inflict any irreversible damage. Colorectal cancer is the second-deadliest form of cancer, and the study, led by Dr Yuichi Mori of Showa University, has the potential to increase survival rates significantly, since early detection of colorectal cancer is “highly treatable,” according to researchers. Dr Mori believes that “these results are acceptable for clinical application,” and he hopes to “obtain regulatory approval for the diagnostic system.”

In recent years, AI-based health solutions have revolutionized the effectiveness of diagnosing patients more accurately. The more refined these deep-learning programs become, the more accurate the assessments become. While many hospitals are beginning to embrace the technology already, further improvements will make the technology irresistible to the world’s best hospitals.

As more samples are included within a given data set (for this type of cancer and others), the accuracy of diagnoses will skyrocket. Thanks to economies of scale, this may also make the technology more affordable for hospitals with lower budgets. In this specific case, a rising tide can truly raise all boats. In the future, we may even see government subsidies paid to private hospitals to incorporate the promising technology.

But it isn’t just deep-learning programs that are at the fore of breakthrough medical technology. In fact, there is so much data surging through hospitals and healthcare facilities every day that it can seem like an overwhelming task just to parse these mountains of data; however, thanks to pioneering products such as Everyday AI from WorkFusion, healthcare companies can now process their hitherto unstructured data, thereby significantly improving patient outcomes.