When I first started writing for Wealth Daily (more than five years ago), I saw a major artificial intelligence (AI) trend, especially within the technology and medicine sectors. I was constantly reading articles about the potential benefits that this technology was going to bring to a variety of sectors and the impact it was set to have on the global economy. It was exciting reading all about the potential of this technology.
I knew that the potential that was being talked about wasn’t going to be lost. That the next decade was going to be huge for AI and that most likely this was just the starting point. It’s been a while since I talked about artificial intelligence — mainly because those articles started to die down or I started reading the same thing over and over. Then other topics emerged within the markets and current events sort of shifted the conversation.
While the conversation did somewhat shift, companies were still investing in artificial intelligence and working more closely with the technology. It wasn’t going away — rather, it seems it was just getting a little bit of fine-tuning and companies were getting a better understanding of the technology and some of the possibilities that we could actually start to see very soon.
Some of those major players within the artificial intelligence realm include Google, IBM, Baidu, Microsoft, Apple, IPsoft, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics, and MicroStrategy. Some of them were advancing and investing in AI when we were hearing those murmurs years ago about the technology’s potential and how it could be extremely useful and profitable.
AI Is Growing Stronger and Stronger
According to a report from Research and Markets, the global artificial intelligence market is expected to grow from $40.17 billion in 2020 to $51.56 billion in 2021, which represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28.4%. That is a massive amount of growth in one year. That same report indicates that the global market is expected to reach $171.02 billion in 2025 at a CAGR of 35%.
This massive growth within the market can be attributed to those major players investing in AI technologies or AI startups. The Research and Markets report mentions that Microsoft has invested around $1 billion in OpenAI, a San Francisco-based company. OpenAI and Microsoft’s partnerships aim to develop AI supercomputing technologies on Microsoft’s cloud, Azure.
AI Helping Detect COVID-19
AI is also paving the way for breakthroughs in research and development and diagnostics in the healthcare sector. Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation (TIBI) researchers are using artificial intelligence technology right now and have developed and validated an image-based detection model for COVID-19. This model can analyze lung images and detect COVID-19 infection.
The current go-to method of detecting whether someone has COVID-19 is to collect samples from nasal or throat swabs. However, that method can result in inaccuracies because of sampling errors, low viral load, and sensitivity limitations. Some of these inaccuracies are especially prone to occur when patients are in the early stages of their infection.
The TIBI researchers have been able to develop an AI image-based detection model that helps identify COVID-19 infection. The model can analyze to identify features as potential diagnostic biomarkers for COVID-19, which allows for researchers to differentiate COVID-19 patients from pneumonia and healthy patients. The AI model has been developed using 704 chest X-rays and validated with 1,597 cases from multiple sources of healthy, pneumonia, and COVID-19 patients.
Lead researcher Samad Ahadian, Ph.D., had this to say in a press release:
This highly advanced artificial intelligence model further helps our ability to precisely detect COVID-19 patients. In addition, such a model can be applied for diagnosis of other diseases using different imaging modalities.
This is great news for being able to diagnose not only COVID-19 but also other diseases. This type of technology is set to become an important tool in diagnosis and prognostic assessments of diseases. Using AI image-based detection shows amazing promise in this area of medicine and could pave the way to assist and improve other areas, which could save lives.
TIBI CEO and director Ali Khademhosseini, Ph.D., had this to say:
Artificial intelligence-driven models with diagnostic and predictive capabilities are a powerful tool that are an important part of our research platforms here at the institute. This will carry over into countless applications in the biomedical field and in the clinic.
The investment into artificial intelligence in medicine and health care is only going to increase in the years to come, which will positively affect future forecasts for the global artificial intelligence market. And this is just one example of how AI is improving lives and innovating the world.
