Google tackles an arduous task: the chaotic writing of doctors! He is developing an artificial intelligence capable of deciphering prescriptions using a simple photo. A function in the experimental phase which raises the question of data confidentiality…
The writing of doctors is an art in its own right, often very hermetic – to believe that it is a selection criterion! The letters are more like hieroglyphs than the Latin alphabet, and the handwritten prescriptions, hastily written, turn out to be illegible. And, obviously, this is a problem encountered all over the world! One might think that pharmacists are used to it and that it is up to them to carry out the difficult task of translation, but this remains a problem when the patient has to re-read his prescription at home, especially for the dosage.
Fortunately, Google comes to our rescue! During its annual conference in India – a very important market for the group, with more than 500 million users – called Google for India and held on December 19, the Web giant presented an artificial intelligence (AI ) capable of deciphering doctors’ handwriting. As explained in a press release Manish Gupta, director of research at Google Research India, “ironically, what makes prescriptions hard for computers to scan is the same thing that makes them hard for you and me to read — they’re unstructured, in shorthand, and full of clues for pharmacists to decipher.“. Thanks to a new function in Google Lens, it will be enough to take the precious sesame in photo to know the drugs prescribed by its practitioner. Note that the project is for the moment only at the prototype stage, and Google n has not indicated whether it intends to develop this technology outside of Asia.
Google AI: machine learning and data privacy
To decipher the prescriptions, the Internet giant will use Google Lens, its AI-powered object recognition tool that is already working miracles. One of its latest improvements allows you to translate text in real time, simply by pointing your smartphone’s camera at it. The app is also capable of digitally transcribing handwritten notes. Google therefore intends to go even further by allowing users to scan their prescription to decrypt it using AI, which will translate the practitioner’s calligraphy. “Today we announced a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and machine learning model that can identify and even highlight drugs in handwritten prescriptions. It will act as an assistive technology for scanning handwritten medical documents by adding humans into the loop such as pharmacists, but no decision will be made solely based on the result provided by this technology“, explains Manish Gupta.
Thus, the firm intends to use machine learning by relying on the experience of pharmacists to read prescriptions. To achieve this, they learn over time to recognize the handwriting of each doctor and guess the most common and usual drugs with their first and last letter. However, this raises questions about the confidentiality of the data. — it’s Google we’re talking about. Because to refine its performance, the AI will “read” millions of prescriptions, and Google will be aware of the medical prescriptions of its users…