On October 8th 2021, the BAC Education Group invited Dr.Debarka Sengupta, an Associate Professor at IIIT-Delhi and OUT-Brisbane, and the Co-Founder of D.kraft, to host an online webinar addressing the topic; How Does AI Impact Our Healthcare. The webinar was held online via Zoom from 4pm to 5pm, and was open to the public. Approximately 52 people were in attendance that evening.
The purpose of this webinar was to educate the participants on how Artificial Intelligence is used in healthcare today. Dr Debarka’s session focused mainly on AI in relation to Breast Cancer and the Different Types of Computational Learning. As cancer is prevalant in today’s world, Dr.Debarka chose to start off with a specific case study, “Precision Oncology Using AI to Predict Resistance to Cancer Therapy”. Using this case study he highlighted statistics, talked about the different drugs used for cancer therapy, and explained to the participants; the central dogma of molecular biology.
Dr.Debarka also took the time to explain the approach of collecting data and how AI technology is applied to that. He used a recent study to break it down for the participants and provide an example. In this study, using AI, they were able to indicate in a group of 3000 cancer patients, who was given the right kind of drug for their specific condition and who was not. This prediction, based on the machine learning method, led to a 70% improvement rate, which is very good.
Several disadvatanges and drawbacks of not using AI in healthcare, were also highlighted. Dr.Debarka then used this list of disadvantages and drawbacks to highlight the vast differences in several aspects of healthcare, when AI wasused. This included saving costs, saving lives, and more accurate predictions by a large percentage.
Dr.Debarka wisely stated that, “No human mind can ever comprehend the amount of information that these AI systems can ingest and digest and disseminate. This is going to be our future.”Overall, the participants were informed of the many benefits of using AI in healthcare.
The webinar received positive responses from the attendees, who agreed that they found the content useful. On a whole, the webinar was engaging, fresh, and insightful.
