Intelligent speech technologies for transcription, disease diagnosis, and medical equipment interactive control in smart hospitals: A review.

Journal: Computers in biology and medicine
PMID:

Abstract

The growing and aging of the world population have driven the shortage of medical resources in recent years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fortunately, the rapid development of robotics and artificial intelligence technologies help to adapt to the challenges in the healthcare field. Among them, intelligent speech technology (IST) has served doctors and patients to improve the efficiency of medical behavior and alleviate the medical burden. However, problems like noise interference in complex medical scenarios and pronunciation differences between patients and healthy people hamper the broad application of IST in hospitals. In recent years, technologies such as machine learning have developed rapidly in intelligent speech recognition, which is expected to solve these problems. This paper first introduces IST's procedure and system architecture and analyzes its application in medical scenarios. Secondly, we review existing IST applications in smart hospitals in detail, including electronic medical documentation, disease diagnosis and evaluation, and human-medical equipment interaction. In addition, we elaborate on an application case of IST in the early recognition, diagnosis, rehabilitation training, evaluation, and daily care of stroke patients. Finally, we discuss IST's limitations, challenges, and future directions in the medical field. Furthermore, we propose a novel medical voice analysis system architecture that employs active hardware, active software, and human-computer interaction to realize intelligent and evolvable speech recognition. This comprehensive review and the proposed architecture offer directions for future studies on IST and its applications in smart hospitals.

Authors

  • Jun Zhang
    First School of Clinical Medicine, Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Jinan, China.
  • Jingyue Wu
    Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine, School of Medicine and Health Sciences, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, United States.
  • Yiyi Qiu
    The State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, School of Instrument Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China.
  • Aiguo Song
    School of Instrument Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, P.R. China.
  • Weifeng Li
    Department of Emergency Medicine, Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital, Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences, Guangzhou, 510080, China.
  • Xin Li
    Veterinary Diagnostic Center, Shanghai Animal Disease Control Center, Shanghai, China.
  • Yecheng Liu
    Emergency Department, State Key Laboratory of Complex Severe and Rare Diseases, Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Science and Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China.