Can AI help modernise Ireland’s healthcare system?

For a country known as European Big Tech, Ireland hospitals often leave in technology.

They lack common computerized patient records, or unique identifiers to track people when they move between clinics.

In July 2024, the failure of a computer system at MATER Hospital at Dublin Hospital at the back and begged people not to come to A & E.

Three years ago, Russian Ransomware attackers closed the entire computer network for the Irish health system, and published medical records 520 people online.

But Ireland now has ambitious goals to update health care.

This includes Program called Sláintecare. The plan was announced in 2017, which is the use of some budget surplus of 22.9 billion euros (20 billion pounds; $ 24 billion) to create free health care service at the care point, such as the United Kingdom or Canada.

To improve health care, disk points such as diagnosis should be improved.

It is a problem dealt with at the 164 -year -old MATER Hospital in Dublin and the site of the most powerful emergency department in Ireland.

This is particularly the case in the winter, when he was in early January 444, AH & E 444 people on vehicles awaiting their vision.

In Ireland, the big problem we have is waiting lists, especially waiting for diagnosis, for MRI photography [magnetic resonance imaging] Or ct [computed tomography] Professor Peter McMahon, a mother radiologist, says.

Because of Professor McMahon, who was a medical student as a programmer programmer, the mother is now among the first hospitals in Ireland that use artificial intelligence (AI) in the radiology department – a part of the hospital that provides medical photography to diagnose diseases and treatment guide.

To ensure that patients with the most urgent needs are seen first, Professor McMahon says: “We use artificial intelligence to analyze all the heads of the head immediately for bleeding, all chest scanning processes for blood clots, and all X -rays of fractures.”

Artificial intelligence is especially useful in helping younger doctors, when they do not have experienced consultants to resort to them.

“Now a nurse or a young doctor at two in the morning, they have no man from the wing,” he says.

Rural hospitals face different types of challenges.

The University of Latikini University in Doning without MRI facilities in the evening and weekends.

Currently, a patient who needs an MRI examination at night can face an ambulance trip to Dublin.

But now, Professor McMahon and an artificial intelligence researcher Paul Bannhan trained the Amnesty International model to create “artificial magnetic resonance imaging” from tomography checks, to patients with spine injuries immediately.

This was done by feeding the “AI Tawnidi” model about 9,500 pairs of tomography and MRI in the same person on the same person.

Now AI can predict what will appear to have an MRI inspection from a CT scan, which is something available in all emergency sections.

Since the radiology scanning also comes with text reports for doctors, it also explores the use of large language models to identify important disease patterns and trends.

The artificial intelligence app on medical images in Ireland is easier because the country has stored scanning operations in a central digital deposit system since 2008.

But many other important information, such as medical notes or the ECGS, are still largely in paper format in most Irish hospitals, or in smaller databases that are not shared centrally.

This would “severely delay” artificial intelligence to discover possible diseases and improve clinical care, and Professor McMahon notes.

The aging of Irish health care systems in Irish health care is a broader challenge.

“Frankly, many hospitals are dealing with old information technology systems as they are just trying to maintain the width on the road,” says Dr. Robert Ross, Senior Computer Science Lecture at Dublin Technological University.

He says: “Doing anything else, such as integrating artificial intelligence, is not easy to do,” he says.

Using artificial intelligence in health care is not without problems.

An example here is Amnesty International. Doctors can allow less time to blog and write reports.

But some were found To manufacture thingsIncluding the invention of the non -existent medicines.

To prevent such artificial intelligence from hallucinations, “you need to make sure to punish him in his training, if it gives you something that does not exist,” says Professor McMahon.

AIS can have biases, but “human beings also have biases.”

The tired doctor, who is expected to be a young patient in good health, can ignore his blood clot.

“For any reason, we are more open to accepting human error”, more than new health technology where “acceptable risks are zero.”

This means that we “continue with a 100 % accuracy in humans”, and ignore the areas that can make technology backed by artificial intelligence better clinical decisions, he says.

Dr. Aidan Boran, founder of a start -up company in the Irish medical technology called Digital Gait Labs, and a researcher at the University of Dublin City, says health care organizers, who are already a “weak enough” understanding of software as a medical device, have never been unprecedented of the rules of artificial intelligence.

For example, it includes obtaining a CE mark, which shows that a medical device that meets the European Union safety regulations, provides details about the factory that is manufactured.

But in the case of non -relevant software, Dr. Boran says. “For us, manufacturing literally means copying programs,” he indicates.

Amnesty International can face a problem with the Black Box: We can see what is happening in it and what comes out, but the deep learning systems that operate these models are very complex so that the creators do not understand exactly what is happening inside them.

This could create difficulties in trying to explain the treatment decisions that include artificial intelligence.

When artificial intelligence affects their decisions, doctors need “to be able to express the reason behind these decisions in a way that can be accessed and understandable to those affected,” he says.