From 4th to 7th of May 2023, Dr Zuhairi Mohd Zainuddin (UiTM)and Dr Edre Mohammad Aidid (IIUM) will be guiding doctors at the AI & Machine Learning Bootcamp for Doctors.
Dr. Zuhairi Zainuddin is a Psychiatric Medical Officer and a trainee Psychiatrist based at Hospital UiTM, Puncak Alam. He taught himself several programming languages such as Javascript, Kotlin, and Python.
An award-winning app developer, Dr. Zuhairi is the founder and co-founder of several apps that have hugely impacted the field of healthcare. He was project leader of the MyCPU, an award-winning app to improve the efficiency of the community in psychiatric care. Others include Mekar which is a prototypal app to monitor and manage psychiatric cases in the Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinic at Hospital Selayang; DEtect a COVID 19 and disease monitoring app for students and staff of IIUM; Psych Census an app that complies relevant info on psychiatry; and Hamil & Sihat an app to help pregnant mothers monitor their pregnancy.
Dr. Edre Mohammad Aidid is a public health physician and epidemiologist at IIUM with experience in communicable diseases epidemiology and digital health. He specializes in epidemiologic studies, geographical information systems, and statistical analysis, with a particular interest in machine learning (ML) techniques and clinical decision support systems in healthcare.Dr. Edre is the founder and consultant of Digital Epidemic Detection and Action (DEtect) Health Initiatives where he led the design and development of a web application for COVID-19 surveillance at IIUM.
His contributions include collaborative research with clinicians using ML which has resulted in more accurate findings to impact patient and community wellbeing. He is also publishing in his fields of expertise and is a speaker at evidence-based practice workshops and is a consultant in the field of statistics.
The Elsevier Health’s The Clinician of the Future Global 2022 Report indicated that 83% of doctors from 111 countries felt that medical training needs to keep pace with technological advancements. So, DD spoke to these two experts on why the Workshop is a timely and important one for healthcare and our doctors. Both men have been in the field of coding and AI and Machine Learning and have incorporated their uses in the field of healthcare while transforming the lives of clinicians.
Here’s an excerpt of that conversation:
DD: What Would You Say to Doctors Who Are Asking if AI and Machine Learning is Important for Them in Their Profession?
Dr. Zuhairi: We can see that AI is being implemented in all professions. So, doctors need to adapt to the times. We can see very soon that doctors with AI are going to replace doctors without AI. So, I strongly believe that doctors who learn now will get the front seat in this revolution.
[If you have AI and Machine Learning capabilities] you are going to be a pioneer in your department and among your colleagues. You are going to be very productive, and very effective and you’ll have lots of patients…You will be able to avoid mistakes in clinical care due to human error.
Dr Edre: There are terabytes of data that can be found in hospitals, clinics, or at teaching hospitals which can be used for improving healthcare outcomes. Improving healthcare outcomes is of utmost importance.
For example, let’s say we have an elderly man with HBP. It’s simply not enough to keep giving him the same medication repeatedly. There need to be improvements that we must make and there are a multitude of factors to consider in doing this. For instance, the man’s socio-economic state, his surroundings etc. matter.. These are data and ML is helpful in analyzing the man’s wellbeing. When you have these sets of data that are being followed up, you can deliver a more precise management of the patient and the community at large.
It’s not always possible to do simple stats to extract as much information as possible from data. That is when data science and ML come in. As an example, using machine learning, we were able to ascertain with high accuracy the close association between bacterial infection and colorectal cancer. The accuracy of ML in this case was even higher than those results provided via lab testing!.
So, machine learning is of much importance in clinical practice where we can assist clinicians to advise their patients to undertake the relevant screening…The implication is that we can intervene quite easily should an issue arise in patients. As medical and healthcare professionals, we are at the forefront of our patients’ wellbeing. Medical doctors who know AI and ML are in the best position to understand the data better and apply them better to achieve the best outcomes for our patients and the community.
When I encountered patients and hospital managers [through my work], I found out that improving healthcare outcomes were of utmost importance…To achieve that level of wellness and wellbeing [in patients and in the community], you need some kind of data…There’s no running away from achieving that wellness and wellbeing that is data-driven.
