Pioneering conference in Bremen: AI in Health
Much about artificial intelligence (AI) reminds us of the time when computers first came onto the market: There was a lot of scepticism, there was a lot of amazement and very few people anticipated how much the technology would change their everyday lives. That this will also be the case with AI was vividly demonstrated to around 150 participants at a conference in Schuppen 2 in Bremen's Überseestadt at the end of September, in an area that concerns everyone: health. The annual AI in Health conference is primarily organised by the U Bremen Research Alliance, a cooperation between the University of Bremen and German non-university research institutes. For good reason: Bremen is at the forefront of research and development in this field, and not just in northern Germany.
In this area, the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS in Bremen is practically an icon. It has been experimenting with AI and training AI for a long time, for example evaluating image data for radiation therapy. Thanks to AI, it is now possible to treat tumours with more precisely targeted radiation that spares healthy tissue. But getting there in the first place is damn complicated, as Matthias Günther, Professor of Physics in Medical Imaging, admitted with refreshing frankness in his introductory lecture. Even the scientists who are working on it are sometimes mystified: "We get good results, but we don't really understand the connections. We’re always working with a black box.”
This kind of research is being ushed forward by the AI Center for Health Care in the U Bremen Research Alliance, a network funded by the state of Bremen, to which Fraunhofer MEVIS belongs and also the Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology - BIPS. At BIPS, the second funding phase has just begun for the Leibniz Science Campus Digital Public Health (DiPH) project, which was presented by campus spokesperson Prof Dr Hajo Zeeb. The main aim here is to use AI to orient medical care more firmly toward preventing, not just curing. Keyword: empowerment. How can patients be motivated to keep themselves healthier using digital systems and tools? Patients will need apps, and these have to be as user-friendly as possible. How all this can work is the subject of various doctoral theses that young researchers at the DiPH campus are currently writing. At this point in the proceedings, it had become clear that AI is also loaded with social dynamite. "There is a very real danger that AI will lead to a deeper division of society, and we need to prevent that at all costs," says Professor Benjamin Schüz, DiPH campus co-spokesperson.
The conference’s practical workshops demonstrated what miracles AI can already perform. How else are we to interpret the fact that a group of young people is working with barely restrained enthusiasm on the dullest of topics: standardised reply emails from health insurance companies? With that, the crew of JAAI (Just ADD AI), a successful start-up in Bremen's Überseestadt, proved how exciting it can be to take healthcare communication to a new level on a large scale – thanks to AI.
The closing words were reserved for another icon, Professor Lothar Wieler, omnipresent in corona times as head of the Robert Koch Institute, now spokesman for the Hasso Plattner Institute's Digital Health Cluster, and participant in the closing panel discussion: "If we consistently use the opportunities AI offers and contain the risks, the burden of disease will be significantly reduced."
*Disclaimer: This article was not written by AI.