Fei-Fei Li (Google Cloud Chief Scientist, AI/ML) – Towards ambient intelligence in AI-assisted healthcare spaces | The Alan Turing Institute (Apr 2018)


Chapters

00:00:03 AI-Assisted Healthcare: Enhancing Patient and Clinician Care
00:03:46 Creating Smart Healthcare Spaces with Ambient Intelligence
00:13:52 Enhancing Healthcare through Smart Sensors: A Case Study of Depth and Thermal Sensors
00:16:12 Sensing, Recognizing, and Tracking Human Activities in Healthcare Settings
00:26:08 Fine-Grained Activity Recognition in Densely Populated Environments
00:28:30 Efficient Video Modeling for Real-Time Human Activity Understanding
00:31:00 Selective Frame Recognition for Real-time Video Activity Detection
00:33:55 AI-Assisted Healthcare: Sensing, Activity Recognition, and Ecosystem

Abstract

AI in Healthcare: Enhancing Human Work and Improving Patient Care

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds immense promise in healthcare, enhancing clinicians’ capabilities and improving patient outcomes. This article explores various aspects of AI-assisted healthcare, highlighting collaborations among researchers, clinicians, and technologists to develop systems that complement human expertise. Innovations in sensor technology, computer vision, data integration, and human activity recognition are transforming healthcare, addressing challenges like cost, quality, and efficiency. Advances in activity detection in long video sequences using frame selection optimize efficiency and address data scarcity.

Introduction

Fei-Fei Li, an expert in AI, emphasizes that AI’s role in healthcare is not to replace humans but to assist and enhance their work. This approach recognizes the complexity and sensitivity of healthcare activities, where errors can have severe consequences. The goal is to establish a partnership between human and AI, leveraging AI’s potential to improve care quality, safety, and efficiency. By listening and integrating directly with healthcare professionals, AI can enhance care.

Innovations in Sensing and Activity Recognition

Healthcare spaces are being equipped with sensors to collect data on activities and behaviors, similar to the transformation seen in self-driving cars. Innovations in computer vision algorithms analyze sensor data to recognize human activities. Tailored to the unique challenges of healthcare settings, these algorithms are crucial for understanding patient-clinician interactions and workflow. The potential of these technologies for enhancing patient safety and optimizing hospital workflows is exemplified by projects like hand hygiene recognition. Collaboration with clinicians is vital for AI researchers to understand their work environment and needs. Stanford Children’s Hospital, Stanford Hospital, Intermountain Hospital, and a senior home facility in San Francisco have provided generous support for our research. I would like to highlight the significant contributions of Professor Arne Milstein and Serena Young to the slides and the work presented.

Integrating Data for Smarter Healthcare

A critical step towards smart hospitals and ambient intelligence is integrating data from physical spaces with electronic health records (EHR) and other clinical data systems. However, this integration faces challenges due to variations in data formats and security requirements. Standardized formats and interoperability standards are necessary to overcome these hurdles.

The Role of Sensors in Healthcare

Sensors, including depth and thermal sensors, play a pivotal role in healthcare, offering continuous, comprehensive coverage while addressing privacy concerns. Their combined use in environments like senior homes illustrates the potential of these technologies in assessing health conditions and improving care. Sparse CCTV cameras are insufficient for this purpose, as healthcare is a private and intimate space, requiring dense and constant monitoring. Modern depth sensors like the Connect depth sensor are affordable and effective, covering entire spaces with orange dots representing sensor placement. These sensors recognize people without seeing their faces, preserving privacy. Thermal sensors complement depth sensors, especially for monitoring patients under bed sheets, while also protecting patient privacy. My students installed these sensors in a senior home facility in San Francisco. Fei-Fei Li’s team utilized depth and thermal sensors to monitor semi-independent senior citizens, aiding doctors and family members in assessing their health.

Challenges and Solutions in Data Management

The abundance of data from diverse sensor viewpoints presents significant challenges, including limited training data for outlier events and the need for computational efficiency. However, solutions like the Dense Multi-Labeling of Human Activities and the development of Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks (RCNNs) and Multi-LSTM models demonstrate progress in recognizing complex human behaviors and integrating temporal information.

Activity Detection in Long Video Sequences using Frame Selection

Efficient activity detection in long video sequences is crucial for real-time human recognition and managing vast amounts of data. This approach involves selecting starting frames and segments cleverly to recognize activities without examining every frame. A CNN representation and LSTM or RN are used to hypothesize whether the frame is suitable as a starting point for action recognition. If not, the approach skips a few frames and selects another one. Once a suitable segment is found, the onset and end of the action are identified, and the action is recognized. By using this approach, only 2% of the frames are needed during inference time to achieve the same or slightly better accuracy compared to traditional methods.

AI-Assisted Health Care: Overcoming Data Scarcity and Enhancing Patient Care

Data scarcity, particularly for rare or infrequent clinical events like patient falls, is a major challenge in healthcare. To address this, self-supervised learning and transfer learning are explored. Self-supervised learning involves training models on unlabeled data to learn useful representations that can be transferred to supervised tasks with limited labeled data. Transfer learning involves adapting a model trained on a different task or domain to a new task with limited data. Insufficient data poses challenges in detecting human activities like falling. The research team explores self-supervised and transfer learning techniques to detect falls using videos from various sources, including YouTube and thermal sensors. To enhance predictions, diagnosis, and treatment, the team aims to combine multiple data types, including video, thermal, and depth sensors.

Future Directions and Ethical Considerations

As AI-assisted healthcare progresses, it faces challenges in scaling up embedded sensing, advancing human activity recognition, and addressing privacy and safety concerns. The focus remains on enhancing clinician capabilities and integrating AI into healthcare systems for improved patient care.

Conclusion

AI in healthcare signifies a paradigm shift towards more efficient, safe, and patient-centered care. By assisting and enhancing the work of healthcare professionals, AI technologies promise to revolutionize healthcare, making it more accessible, efficient, and effective. This integration of AI and healthcare, rooted in collaboration and innovation, paves the way for a future where technology and human expertise work hand in hand for the betterment of patient care.


Notes by: Hephaestus