[Artificial Intelligence: Challenges and Applications in Intensive Care Medicine].

Journal: Anasthesiologie, Intensivmedizin, Notfallmedizin, Schmerztherapie : AINS
Published Date:

Abstract

The high workload in intensive care medicine arises from the exponential growth of medical knowledge, the flood of data generated by the permanent and intensive monitoring of intensive care patients, and the documentation burden. Artificial intelligence (AI) is predicted to have a great impact on ICU work in the near future as it will be applicable in many areas of critical care medicine. These applications include documentation through speech recognition, predictions for decision support, algorithms for parameter optimisation and the development of personalised intensive care medicine. AI-based decision support systems can augment human therapy decisions. Primarily through machine learning, a sub-discipline of AI, self-adaptive algorithms can learn to recognise patterns and make predictions. For actual use in clinical settings, the explainability of such systems is a prerequisite. Intensive care staff spends a large amount of their working hours on documentation, which has increased up to 50% of work time with the introduction of PDMS. Speech recognition has the potential to reduce this documentation burden. It is not yet precise enough to be usable in the clinic. The application of AI in medicine, with the help of large data sets, promises to identify diagnoses more quickly, develop individualised, precise treatments, support therapeutic decisions, use resources with maximum effectiveness and thus optimise the patient experience in the near future.

Authors

  • Lukas Martin
    Department of Intensive Care and Intermediate Care, University Hospital RWTH Aachen, Aachen, Germany.
  • Arne Peine
  • Maike Gronholz
  • Gernot Marx
    Department of Intensive Care and Intermediate Care, University Hospital RWTH Aachen, Aachen, Germany.
  • Johannes Bickenbach
    Department of Intensive Care Medicine, University Hospital RWTH Aachen, Aachen, Germany.