Artificial intelligence (AI), is a general term describing the computer systems that have the ability to model human intelligence and perform in a human-like fashion.
Machine learning, a sub-domain of AI, is the study of algorithms that can educate and improve themselves through analysing an input, usually a large amount of relevant data. What makes AI superior is its ability to collect data, analyse them, identify patterns, learn from it, and extract an output without any human intervention. It rapidly creates its own logic using artificial neural networks that resemble biological neural networks, offering increased performance, subjectivity, and automation. (1)
With its near-ubiquitous reach, artificial intelligence (AI) has infiltrated practically every industry imaginable including healthcare. The prospective applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology are revolutionary.
AI in drug development and regulatory writing
AI is redefining the clinical research landscape, A large portion of clinical protocols and clinical study reports can be automatically created by AI tools in a matter of hours, instead of weeks, so that the medical writer can focus on activities that require a higher level of scientific interpretation.
Application of NLP technology in regulatory writing and pharmacovigilance is revolutionary. It has redefined the role of medical writers, who will no longer be responsible for extracting information from different sources and for integrating it into a readable and comprehensible text document. AI-based tools can perform this task accurately in a short time, drastically reducing the load of preparation of documents. In the interest of getting medications to market faster, these tools will mean getting submissions and pharmacovigilance documents out the door faster and enable all of the people involved in producing these deliverables (whether it is quality control specialists, clinical leads, or medical writers) to process a greater number of them in a shorter timeframe with higher accuracy and correctness.
AI in content creation
Many medical writers use AI based writing assistant tools. Text mining performs linguistic analysis is able to extract detailed information, reveal patterns across millions of documents, and automatically summarise loads of information expeditiously.
AI powered article summarizers reads research articles, reports and book chapters in seconds and breaks them down into bite-sized sections. By identifying key information such as study participants, data analyses, main findings and limitations, medical writers can quickly decide on how relevant that article is for their work.
AI in scientific writing, publishing and editing
A major breakthrough in the AI field is the fast improvement of natural language processing (NLP). It has the capability to scan metadata, perform tailored literature searches, and accurately extract targeted information from vast unstructured databases. This is particularly important in an age where a growing number of scientific articles are available at PubMed and hundreds of clinicalstudies are accessible at ClinicalTrials.gov. (2)
AI tools can give a hand in most of the laborious processes of peer review.The task of finding reviewers for an academic peer-reviewed scientific journal can be made efficient by using algorithms for assigning reviewers and improving reviewer experience and retention.AI is already beginning to hit the ground in these five areas:
1.Identifying new peer reviewers with broader searches
2.Fighting plagiarism with software that can identify components of whole sentences or paragraphs rather than verbatim text
3.Discovering where authors fail to report key information that would affect accept or reject decisions.
4.Spotting statistical errors that generate false conclusions
5.Detecting data fabrication (3)
Likewise, editing can be automated with AI-based tools that can automatically control and amend documents to comply with required styles and formats. (2)
AI is the buzzword right now. It is a concept that excites people and strikes fear into their hearts as they imagine machines taking over the thinking process for us. But the truth is AI and digital health are growing trends and, as medical writers, we must understand and communicate these advances.
REFERENCES:
1)Parisis.Medical writing in the era of artificial intelligence. Medical writing 2019;28(4);4-8.
2)Costa.Embracing a new friendship: Artificial intelligence and medical writing. Medical writing 2019;28(4);14-17.
3)Delahunty – Artificial intelligence – will we be replaced by robots?Medical writing 2019;28(3)20-21.
MS-MC-BL-21-5.
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