Artificial intelligence is now being used by Irish doctors. In north Dublin, the Mater public hospital is the first in the country to use AI, in its radiology department.
The noise of the MRI is something radiologists at the Mater Hospital in north Dublin are familiar with. But since October 2022, another noise has come to change their habits. That of a notification sent by artificial intelligence. The aim: to highlight priority cases, as Peter MacMahon, the hospital’s chief radiologist, explains: “A patient comes in and let’s say they’ve been in a car accident. They’re usually assessed by the medical team at the front desk, who will often order a CT scan. The AI software will evaluate all the scans and will tell us – with a little ‘beep’ – if they think the result is positive for a traumatic injury.” A brain hemorrhage or a neck fracture, for example. So it’s basically a triage tool that signals to radiologists which cases need to be examined as quickly as possible.
AI already used for more than 25,000 exams
The benefits of AI are therefore tangible. By speeding up critical diagnoses, AI can save lives. The waiting time for patients in hospital is reduced and it is also a valuable time saving for frontline healthcare staff.
“It’s like an ally, keeping an eye on us”says Pete MacMahon. “And often, AI can detect tiny bleeds, which we may have missed! When you work in a busy department, you have 150 scans to analyze, there is pressure to process cases quickly and it is easy to miss a small bleed… When AI tells us something, there is a very good chance that it is correct. And so, we trust it now!”
An additional safety net
This artificial intelligence, designed by the company Aidoc, would have an accuracy rate of more than 90%, according to Mike Burns, sales director in the United Kingdom and Ireland: “We’ve probably all been in a situation, whether it’s ourselves, our friends or our family, where we’ve missed something somewhere. So having an AI tool running in the background, to provide an extra safety net for everyone, can only be a good thing. So the challenge now is to scale this up to the rest of Ireland to deliver similar benefits elsewhere.”
