Artificial Intelligence (AI) is gradually revolutionizing the world of medicine: advances in machine learning, deep thinking and big data are constant. They will contribute, in the near future, to improving the accuracy of medical diagnoses, the treatment and prevention of many diseases and promise to relieve health practitioners of time-consuming tasks. The 4Ps medicine (personalized, preventive, predictive and participative) will replace curative medicine.
Europe is looking for a regulatory framework
Among the major challenges of its development: research and innovation, of course, but also ethical issues, starting with the protection of health data that must be collected to continuously improve the performance of software and tools based on AI.
This data is crucial for AI to become truly efficient and useful for medicine. In the very near future, healthcare players know that they will need to modernize their IT infrastructure so that it can meet the new standards imposed by AI: by 2023, connected health alone will account for a 70% increase in IT spending by organizations whose business is related to life sciences.
At the European level, for several years now, the heart of the European Commission seems to be swinging between a desire for regulation and a desire for innovation. The central issue of the European strategy can be summarized as follows: developing artificial intelligence while controlling the risks it poses to the fundamental rights of human beings. In spring 2022, the EU should present the European Health Data Space, a key element in guaranteeing the security of patient data. It is also a decisive step that will allow researchers to move forward without fear of innovating outside the framework.
The AI market in healthcare will grow 10-fold by 2027
The global market for artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare was worth €4.3 billion in 2020. According to a projection, its annual growth rate is expected to continue to rise to 50% and the market is expected to be worth nearly 45 billion euros in 2027.
Growing demand for personalized therapy but also for cost reduction, increasing volume and complexity of health data, accelerating effect of the Covid-19 crisis, now demonstrated potential of AI tools in health, especially for the treatment of chronic diseases... The reasons for this hypergrowth are numerous and this has not escaped the attention of private investors and governments of some major powers.
France is committed to innovation in Artificial Intelligence
This is particularly true for France, which knows that investing massively in the development of artificial intelligence, in all fields of application, is essential. The public efforts to fund AI research announced by the Minister of Research and Higher Education Frédérique Vidal in October 2021 are relatively significant: in total, an envelope of €2.2 billion (including €1.5 billion in public funding) was announced in early November 2021, for the next five years.
Another interesting indicator is that the number of French start-ups working on artificial intelligence solutions for healthcare has risen from 102 in 2019 to 191 in 2020. Anxious to ensure that these innovations see the light of day in a safe framework, France set up the Health Data Hub in 2018, which supports project developers by ensuring that citizens' rights are respected.
Germany and Israel, at the forefront, play the cooperation card
Among our most active European neighbors in AI and health research is Germany, which has promised to put €200 million a year on the table by 2024 to accelerate the development of its start-ups.
To go faster and further, our neighbor is multiplying cooperation initiatives: with France and Japan in 2018; with France in 2020; and, most recently, with Israel: the two states, which are showing themselves to be particularly at the forefront of the subject, have indeed just created a joint forum to work on promoting the use of AI and machine learning in healthcare.
The German Federal Ministry of Health hopes to benefit from the expertise that Israel has developed in recent years. Digitalization of healthcare, use of AI in medical imaging, development of algorithms for early detection of diseases and their medical diagnoses: Israel has demonstrated its ambitions and, according to a report by Start Up nation central, investments in Israeli digital health companies flirted with 900 million euros in the first six months of 2021.
Great Britain spearheads the Old Continent
Britain is also defending its position and seems to be setting itself up as the European continent's leader in AI research for medicine. In 2019, the British National Health Service (NHS) announced a €260 million plan to accelerate the development of innovation in the AI and health sector. And for 2021 alone, the funded projects (particularly in the golden triangle of British universities that are Oxford, Cambridge and London) number 34 (14 in phase 1, 9 in phase 2, 10 in phase 3 and 5 in phase 4).
They cover many fields of application of AI in health: tools for detecting colon cancer or analyzing dermatological lesions or software to help manage health care complaints... The British, like others, know that developing operational solutions that can effectively benefit the greatest number of people takes time, but we must act without delay to develop them.
China's efforts are essential to its people
But the race against the clock has been on for a long time and, according to many observers, there is not a second to lose if we want to avoid that only China makes it out of the game. China is only third in terms of innovation behind the United States and Great Britain, but it is far ahead of other countries when it comes to investment.
While the development of AI in healthcare should eventually provide immense services to the entire world population, the challenge seems particularly important for the Chinese: the country, which has 1.4 billion inhabitants, has only 12 million doctors, mainly concentrated in the country's eastern metropolises. In China, AI is essential to open up entire territories, which are veritable medical deserts.
The United States maintains its lead
The Americans continue to lead the way in research and innovation. Public investments are certainly a drop in the bucket compared to the sums committed by a few giants of new technologies, led by Microsoft, Facebook and Google.
But the federal government's policy is clearly aimed at facilitating its development: it does not hesitate to pay doctors to encourage them to use an artificial intelligence algorithm that can diagnose eye diseases in diabetics or complications in stroke patients. A voluntary policy, but largely supported by a huge private strike force.
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