Artificial intelligence in the sector of Ayurveda: Scope and opportunities

摘要

The importance of digital infrastructure, technology, and innovation in achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is critical and important in making progress toward them. The strategic and innovative use of digital and information and communications technologies is an essential factor for ensuring the Triple Billion Targets, i.e., 1 billion more people benefit from universal health coverage, that 1 billion more people are better protected from health emergencies, and that 1 billion more people enjoy better health and well-being. Digital transformation and technologies in health care such as virtual care, remote monitoring, Artificial Intelligence (AI), big data analytics, blockchain, smart wearables, platforms, tools enabling data exchange and storage, remote data capture, and the exchange of data and sharing of relevant information across the health ecosystem have enhanced the health outcomes by improving medical diagnosis, data-based treatment decisions, digital therapeutics, clinical trials, self-management of care, and person-centered care as well as creating more evidence-based knowledge, skills, and competence for professionals to support health care.[1] The World Health Organization's (WHO's) “Global Strategy on digital health 2020–2025” has emphasized the use of AI to strengthen health systems with its varied range of applications, specifically focusing on the needs of consumers, health professionals, health-care providers, and industry toward empowering the patients and achieving the vision of health for all.[1] Although the concept of AI began in the 1950s, in recent times, it has shown enormous potential in enhancing health-care delivery worldwide with its significant impact in disciplines such as drug discovery, genomics, radiography, pathology, prevention, detecting outbreaks of early epidemics, and health research.[2] The Council on AI of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) defines an AI system as “A machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing real or virtual environments.” AI systems are designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy.[3] AI is any software technology with at least one of the following capabilities: perception – including audio, visual, textual, and tactile (e.g., face recognition), decision-making (e.g., medical diagnosis systems), prediction (e.g., weather forecast), automatic knowledge extraction and pattern recognition from data (e.g., the discovery of fake news circles in social media), interactive communication (e.g., social robots or chatbots), and logical reasoning (e.g., theory development from premises).[4] ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND HEALTH SECTOR Various world's largest technology companies are spending heavily on data collection (including health data), algorithm development, and AI deployment. There are several distinct areas for increasing the efficiency and improving the utility of AI, which include search and optimization capacity, natural language processing, Machine Learning (ML) and probabilistic reasoning, neural networks, and planning and decision-making; of which ML, natural language processing, and neural networks are increasingly being used to evaluate enormous amounts of data.[5] AI, as a virtual human body, augments the drug discovery and development process through computer-aided drug-designing methods, which could serve as an efficient tool for the discovery of novel drug compounds. Nowadays, high-throughput AI-assisted approaches are being employed in conjunction with bioinformatics to understand in-depth biology and pathophysiology. With the advent of AI systems, clinical studies can be altered and conducted dynamically with the usage of supercomputing AI systems, algorithms, and high-throughput techniques, enabling in-depth analyses of the studies, reducing the fluctuation in results, minimizing errors, and enhancing the output