Sushovan Guha, MD, PhD, is a gastroenterologist and physician executive director at Banner Digestive Diseases Institute in Phoenix. He shared his thoughts on the uses of artificial intelligence in gastroenterology with Becker's ASC Review.
Question: What AI-driven technologies are you excited for in the future?
Dr. Sushovan Guha: Using colorization for detection of helicobacter pylori infection. And this will be a huge leap because you don't have to then keep biopsying and then wait for a few days. In real time, you can diagnose. Otherwise, patients have to again come back for either a repeat test, or like a blood test or a stool test, or sometimes even endoscopy. So we can prevent some of these unnecessary procedures if in real time we can do that presence or absence of helicobacter and then, obviously, looking for any gastric cancers and other things that will come up. There's been a lot of work on that.
The other thing which we are very interested in is using artificial intelligence to detect lesions which are beyond the regular normal field of view of the colonoscopy and endoscopies. Then we can use other techniques to identify and remove them.
Q: Do you have any clue as to how many years down the line that these may be widely adopted, or where do you see this technology going in the next five or 10 years?
SG: I would say the next one to two years, we will have pretty good analytics out in the field of inflammatory bowel disease and GI bleed. Regarding infection prevention, I think it will take time. I would say that would take at least three to four years before we get there. So, but the rest, I think probably for computer detection and diagnosis, that's actually we should see it within a year. Some prototypes are already coming out.