As the social value of high-performance computing (HPC) is becoming increasingly obvious, Lenovo has revealed four ways that HPC and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are playing an important role in the public health domain, the administration of healthcare and the clinical setting, particularly when it comes to the automation of diagnosis processes.
Some ways in which HPC streamlines healthcare processes is by enabling both researchers and clinicians to ask bigger and more complex questions and get the answers much faster.
Why bioinformatics matters
HPC is useful in bioinformatics, which is a multidisciplinary field that integrates the principles of mathematics, statistics, computer science and biological science. The role of bioinformatics in medical research is to extract knowledge from biomedical data. HPC systems are now evolving to meet bioinformaticians’ needs, with new hardware and software products allowing more sophisticated uses of data.
Understanding our genes
HPC enables businesses to not only be quick but to also be accurate, allowing users to focus more on individual data. The life sciences industry is shifting from the development of blockbusters – which addresses the needs of the masses – to developing more niche, personalised solutions for patients. That’s the promise of genomics, the study of the genome. Genomics is providing us with a far more detailed understanding of what causes illness and infectious diseases and it’s underpinning the development of innovations that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago.
The role of AI
Artificial Intelligence will be important in everything from drug discovery to public health to the clinical setting.
Drug manufacturers frequently apply machine learning techniques to extract chemical information from large compound data sets and use this to design new drugs for clinical trials. AI models can be trained to better select study participants with advanced statistical methods and to assess the results of the studies.
In the clinical setting, the potential of AI ranges from the automation of diagnosis processes to therapeutic decision-making and clinical research. AI can assist in the public health domain as well, in preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health. Other applications of AI is in the administration of healthcare. Healthcare systems are characterised by heavy administrative workflow. AI can perform different types of routines related to that administrative effort in a more efficient, accurate and unbiased fashion.
HPC and AI in healthcare – the future
Looking ahead to the future, society must make it easier for healthcare organisations to use these important tools. Rather than research institutions taking the components and starting from scratch, these tools need to be integrated in a way that makes it easier for organisations in the healthcare space to make the most of them.
HPC can offer answers to many problems and, combined with AI, can herald a new era of personalised medicine. It is therefore crucial that medical experts have the access they need to these game-changing technologies.