How AI is helping advance women's health around the world – The Keyword | Google Product and Technology News
Well being
Mar 08, 2024
min learn
For Worldwide Girls’s day, we’re sharing AI options that may enhance early analysis, high quality and entry to care for girls’s well being worldwide.
AI provides an unprecedented alternative to boost world well-being and human well being — notably girls’s well being. For many of historical past, girls’s well being has confronted systemic obstacles together with restricted entry to funding and analysis, resulting in insufficient remedy options and entry to care. We see a future the place AI has the potential to assist overcome these obstacles, and one the place girls are on the forefront of main options and analysis efforts. Historical past has taught us that when girls innovate, options for girls emerge. We additionally know that selling equitable entry to healthcare innovation can result in breakthroughs that enhance lives worldwide.
That’s why Google Analysis has been engaged on growing AI instruments to enhance care and entry to care for girls around the globe, and for Worldwide Girls’s day we wished to share a number of main examples.
Each two minutes a girl dies of childbirth associated problems globally. 70% of those circumstances are in Sub-Saharan Africa and the bulk are preventable — with proof exhibiting that lengthy journey occasions play an element in destructive maternal outcomes. That’s the place emergency obstetric care using AI might help. We’re utilizing AI to raised map entry to obstetric care, serving to companions to make sure women are able to access health services.
In collaboration with OnTime Consortium in Nigeria, in 2022, we developed a tool that identifies the typical journey time to the closest, second nearest, and third nearest EmOC services for various areas. Facilitated on the bottom by our companion, the OnTIME Consortium, choice makers in Benin Metropolis are utilizing the dashboard to determine areas of poor geographic entry to EmOC and can conduct visible inspections to find out the explanations for poor geospatial entry (e.g., potholes, roads in disrepair, commuter habits, lack of an EmOC-trained clinician on the native facility) combining this with the stay expertise of locals so as to make evidence-informed, tailor-made suggestions. The workforce is now engaged on increasing this effort past Nigeria.
Ultrasound is a vital software to trace the well being of a being pregnant and growing fetus. Nonetheless, many areas on the planet lack ultrasound technicians. We’ve been growing AI know-how that makes ultrasounds simpler to carry out and interpret for well being care suppliers that aren’t skilled sonographers. This know-how might increase entry to ultrasound remedy around the globe. In 2023, our Analysis groups within the U.S. and Africa partnered with Jacaranda Health in Kenya to advance the research and improve models in several maternity hospitals. Since our examine kicked off in January, lots of of ladies have participated in our analysis, enabling us to additional advance the event of this AI system.
At present, breast most cancers is the most typical kind of most cancers on the planet. Early detection is essential, and mammograms are the gold customary for breast most cancers screening. However they arrive with limitations — they don’t seem to be accessible to everybody attributable to excessive prices, and will not be as efficient in populations with increased breast density. Then again, ultrasound — generally used as adjunct imaging in breast most cancers analysis — has the potential to be an effective primary detection tool. Google has partnered with Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taiwan to develop and discover whether or not our AI fashions might help with early detection of breast most cancers utilizing ultrasound. In 2023, we launched a first-of-its-kind potential examine to investigate de-identified ultrasound, mammogram, and different biomarkers from examine members so as to develop AI fashions that may allow screening for breast most cancers utilizing ultrasound imaging. To date, we’ve discovered the early outcomes to be promising.
Our work builds on the work of others to bolster girls’s well being — including the U.S. government’s first ever initiative on girls’s well being analysis. With the rising consideration and funding, we’re optimistic about 2024 being a transformative yr for girls’s well being, and for girls in every single place.
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