APPLICATION OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) IN ANIMAL HEALTH AND VETERINARY SCIENCES
Compiled & Edited by-Dr. Rakesh Singh
TVO,MOTIHARI, Department Of Animal Husbandry,Govt. of Bihar
Artificial Intelligence is a form of computational science that involves the creation of machines that can replicate human thinking.Over the past decade, AI has become an indispensable part of medical science.One of the key collaborations between artificial intelligence and medicine has been in the field of diagnostics.Where diagnosing an illness would take days, AI-programs can now diagnose diseases automatically through data analysis. As a result, diagnostics are much cheaper, faster, and easier.It is also being used in the form of clinical decision-making programs that recognize patterns of medical complications, and as information collection systems that hold extensive medical information of all past and present patients of a hospital. But that’s not all.The information thus collected is also analysed by AI’s to help create personalized medication.AI-centric programs are also players in the field of drug discovery, as it is able to card through data that is too complex for humans.In similar ways, AI is also shaping itself to becoming an indelible part of the field of veterinary science.
Artificial intelligence is a field of computer science dealing with the simulation of human intelligence through the use of computers.AI technology rapidly analyzes massive amounts of data according to a set of instructions known as algorithms to accomplish a specific task. These tasks run the gamut, from making an online book or movie recommendation to identifying a person based on their facial features.
There’s a growing demand for the development and use of wearables, smart cameras and other sensors in animal health for pet animals and on farms. These devices generate a huge amount of data, which raises the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) using machine learning algorithms and real-time analysis.
However, despite demand, a review of recent academic publications shows there’s very limited understanding of technologies like AI and machine learning within the animal health industry. It wouldn’t be a leap to suggest the same is true in hardware and other applications. The gap that exists in the understanding between the two fields can be, hopefully, expected to shorten as artificial intelligence gains more popularity.
Data plays a key role
A lot of analysis tools already exist that allow data scientists to analyse and visualise data to find trends and patterns, but it is all based on historically collected data. This is where artificial intelligence can intervene as AI has a lot of value in real-time predictive analysis. With the right data collection methodologies, real-time analysis of how a certain disease is spreading can allow an AI to find commonalities among the samples and identify the cause of the disease spread (such as an infected batch of food from a certain facility). In other cases, AI could study the pattern of the disease spread, to predict the geographical regions it will spread to and allowing farmers, veterinarians and pharmaceutical companies to be better prepared for it.
There are further benefits in using ‘smart cameras’ (cameras powered by AI). There has been research in the use of facial recognition with animals and it now proves that smart cameras can identify individual animals. Such smart cameras, mounted at fixed locations or on drones, can monitor the behaviour of animals and collect data on each individually identifiable animal. For example, monitoring the amount of food a specific cow is taking on a dairy farm, correlated with the amount of milk output with that specific cow – can allow the farms to optimise the milk output out of each cow.
Artificial intelligence in animal health
Artificial Intelligence is also bringing changes to business models in many sectors; particularly regarding when human interaction or action is required, and what decisions are automated. Big data is also changing the way managers make business decisions, making them increasingly quantitative decision-makers, relying on data, rather than just on intuition. IBM is already working on ‘AI assistants’ for veterinarians, that can instantly recognise species the moment a pet or animal walks in through the door, and look up through a database of over 800 medical conditions and caners.
Increasing accuracy of automated veterinary diagnostic tools can change when a veterinarian physically interacts with an animal, with AI deciding whether a physical check-up is even warranted at a particular stage, or with particular symptoms.
What the future holds
Artificial Intelligence has already proven itself to be a major driver for increasing efficiency and productivity in other sectors, and it is about time we expand its implementation in animal health. We can already see the rise of AI-powered apps and tools for farmers and veterinarians, but the options are still limited, and still in their development stages.
AI as a Diagnostic Tool
Some veterinary practices have been using a version of artificial intelligence for decades now. Specifically larger veterinary practices have relied on proprietary systems that embed enhanced diagnostic tools in their practice management software. These programs suggest potential diagnoses, next step therapies, and diagnostic testing alternatives based on clinical signs and test findings. In human medicine, for example, diabetes prediction, traumatic brain injury prognostication, and early atrial fibrillation detection are already aided by AI in this way.
AI isn’t just for determining differential diagnoses — it’s also for complex diagnostic devices. Consider an AI-imbued stethoscope to help identify arrhythmias and other cardiac-sourced disorders. Or a tool that screens urine sediment for abnormalities using AI technology. These devices are invaluable, saving time and increasing efficiency in the practice.
AI as an Imaging Tool
Some AI-reliant imaging services help veterinary teams organize images for clinical interpretation, increasing practice efficiency significantly. Others include what they call “augmented interpretation.” This compares your image to similar images in its database. The quality of the comparison is for humans to interpret, giving veterinary professionals the security they need that no machine is making diagnoses for them.
The Benefits of Using AI in Your Practice
Without AI, most veterinary practices can’t do much with the aggregated data they’re gradually accumulating every day. Data-driven AI tools could add speed, lifesaving medicine, and better client communication to any veterinary practice:
- AI is inherently fast. It takes once-cumbersome, time-intensive tasks and generates answers in seconds, which saves time and money. It does so by redirecting highly trained human resources and increasing operational efficiency.
- By helping diagnose patients faster, treatment can be initiated earlier in the disease process. When every minute counts, AI can be a lifesaver. Moreover, AI’s efficiency means more clients can afford care.
- AI has also been helpful for client communication. When diagnostics can be performed faster — even in real-time — communication is effectively streamlined. AI can also improve communication directly by offering diagnostic reports with text and visual aids that clients can easily understand.
- Ultimately, AI promises to be a big boon to the veterinary healthcare industry. It’s not about making our jobs smaller — not in our lifetimes, anyway. Rather, it’s about making our brains more powerful and our work more efficient and effective, all while raising the standard of care and enhancing client communication.
Presence of AI in Animal Health Care
We all know that advancements in human healthcare are constantly underway. But what we may not know is that animal health care is advancing at an equally fast pace.In the last few years, AI has brought great reforms to the veterinary industry by making:
- Veterinary diagnostics easier
- Medical care accessible
- Data collection convenient
AI Ideas for the Pet Industry
Many companies are already using artificial intelligence to solve problems for pet owners, there are many other areas in the pet space where AI can be deployed. Below are some potential AI Use Cases.
Pet Trackers & Pet Cameras
Pet trackers and pet cameras are a goldmine of pet data. These devices monitor virtually all of your pet’s daily activities – movement, eating and drinking behavior, sleep patterns, etc. This vast amount of information opens up many possibilities for machine learning. Quick definition: machine learning is the use of algorithms to parse data, learn from it, and then make a prediction about something in the world.
Imagine a pet camera that observes your dog licking her paw over the course of several days. Using video analytics software that is programmed to be on the lookout for unusual behavior, the camera sends you an alert to check for an injury or a foreign object causing discomfort.
Similarly, a pet tracker detects that your cat has been sleeping several hours more each day than normal. An algorithm in the tracker texts you that something may be amiss with your kitty and that you may want to call your vet.
Pet Telehealth
Veterinary telehealth, the use of technology to deliver vet care, can benefit from the use of chatbots. A chatbot is software that simulates a natural human conversation (either written of spoken). Vet clinics can install chatbots on their websites to act as the first level of interaction with customers. In addition to assisting with communication, advanced bots could answer pet health questions and analyze symptoms.
A pet version of the Ada Health app could be a game changer. Ada is an app that uses AI to help humans manage their health. The app uses a conversational interface to determine symptoms and provide medical information. If needed, the app then offers a remote consultation with a real doctor. A forward looking pet health company could build a similar app for pets.
Dog Walking
Dog walking companies like Rover and Wag could benefit from a natural language processing (NLP) system that delivers a weekly recap to their customers about their pet’s activities. Dog owners could receive a personalized email story detailing the walk routes, duration, encounters with other dogs, and food and potty breaks. NLP allows an algorithm to create these stories at a speed and scale that is not possible for human writers. Yet the emails still appear to be written by a human.
Smart Feeder & Pet Food
A smart feeder could determine when pet food is running low and suggest a reorder, mentioning current coupons or special discounts.
Smart feeders could also monitor a pet’s eating habits and highlight any irregularities. For example, an algorithm would alert a cat owner that Fluffy is drinking less water than normal and perhaps kidney problem should be considered.
The importance of artificial intelligence is increasing to the extent that we now search for the contributors who can revolutionize the machine learning to facilitate the coverage of various fields and be of human assistance.
AI-based solutions for pet world
Alleviate Efforts: Artificial Intelligence lessens the efforts of humans with the machines that ease the activities designed for animals and reduces supervision.
Communication Barriers: Elimination of communication barrier is crucial, as the non-humans have limited understanding of language. The better part is these limits stretched by either surpassing the language issues, using conversion to vibrations or pictures that pets can recognize.
Dynamics: Study of motion can give an estimation of the next set of action by animals, based on these assumptions’ humans can relate and respond better.
Animal Analogies: AI can help humans to understand animal behavior and assist in introducing new behavioral patterns to meet the needs of business or comfort animal owners.
Observations: If animals can fall asleep when tired so do the humans the transporters who travel long distance at night are at high risk of meeting accidents. AI solutions can help humans from accidents, penalties, huge business, and human body losses. AI can be useful to program the functions, but it is not involved in understanding concepts that are the basis of actions for what they are designed.
Behavior Change: We all have emotional levels that impact our actions and reactions similar observations, found among the animals too. Since their language is not our forte, we rely on assumptions that can lead to accidents involving animal attack and human loss. Every species has their mood swings like humans this can help create AI-based solutions to soothe the user.
Sleep Patterns: Regular and disturbed sleep patterns can help in finding reasons for disorder and the impact on human and animal body in long term. Sleep has direct and proportionate relation with the brain activity, the functional capacity of body, action, and reaction, moods and overall well-being of person or pet.
Thinking Process: We can know more about the thought process of animals, which is likely to be different from that of humans. This can help the AI to create training programs for the animals; conducting training can be a lot easier.
Training: Animals are residing near and have constant touch with human beings; this may help them adopt the atmosphere and accommodation. Tamed, pet animals and those, which are part of animal husbandry all, need a varied amount of training to be part of our lives. Oral and visual interpretation of requirements can lead to improvement in training quality by reducing complexities.
Interweaving AI and solutions: Creating AI-based solutions need to have a strong basis of observation, impact on surroundings and the animals, for intelligent use of technology. If we can create, a set of instructions for an animal to sleep same technology can create a soothing effect on animals to get good sleep. It is what we want to design and how we extrapolate the utilization.
Routine tasks and AI: The pets in our houses are an inseparable part of our lives and they tend to evolve their lives around us. This mutual understanding and inter-dependencies of emotional nature can be taken further to enable animal assistance in our daily and household chores like fetching the newspaper, remaining away from the electronic equipment’s or operating them if required, keeping toys in place and much more. It can reduce the daily tasks executed by humans for animals e.g. keeping their food bowls in place, asking them to use washrooms for nature calls etc.
Automation: The set of instructions for the animals and pets that humans may have to supervise needs lot of time and effort. AI can control the activities by automating the commands given to animals on daily basis and check for the task completion. E.g., Sheep’s needs monitoring for the thickness of fur for extracting wool, a number of times each winter.
Data Analysis: Any data relating to animals age, weight, life expectancy, health issues, growth, puberty, physical changes, reproduction period, hormonal changes, rapport with the group and human caretakers and much more than you can imagine currently is all possible with the technological developments.
Research and Development: AI can take R&D to a level where they can develop the technology to overcome the problems relating to human and animals whether they include pet food, physic or emotional level. Making animals trainable is a long process in itself, it can be shortened, with the identification of potential problems, the complications can be minimized.
Predictions: We are aware that animals have powerful instincts about the climatic changes and the majority of times they are found to migrate from the places where earthquakes or other calamities are about to occur. They can sense faster and accurately which can help AI to notify the humans about the threats.
Fake and Real Simultaneously: AI is artificial intelligence which is also known as fake, but this fake intelligence installed in machines create a loop of learnings from the history and data available making it real for users to have a quality life.
Elimination of Miscommunication: Since AI does not have its own thoughts and beliefs it focuses on what it sees in form of information for data interpretation this eradicates the risks of miscommunication. Just like animals and human communication is complex that can be simplified with AI solutions.
Enhances Creativity: Human creativity is thoughts dependent process and AI can help the creation of innovative solutions without manipulation of available data. It has a positive effect on humans by helping the interpretation of data and its probable uses.
Since animals do understand expressions, body language, voice modulations and have memory for the experience they share with the humans; all these factors can aid the making of AI-based software and solutions that improvise pet care and save wild animals from being extinct.
