One of my ambitions is to use artificial intelligence to personalize medicine, which would completely transform the medical industry. Ever since my mom was hospitalized for congestive heart failure, I didn’t want anyone else to go through the pain and the worry that I went through. This is why I'm so passionate about this topic, and why this scholarship essay is right up my alley. I want to put this problem into scope, making decisions and preventative methods easier, which is exactly what the future progress in the healthcare ecosystem of the world should represent. Imagine being able to use your personal genetics to help you make decisions about disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. This will permit doctors and hospitals to better evaluate data and tailor their health care to each patient's genes, environment, and lifestyle. With innovative technology for the future, the opportunities are endless, and such progress is inevitable.
Since A&M boasts one of the top research universities in the nation, I’ll have a massive supporting cast, world-class professors, and abundant resources at my disposal. With most of the household income going towards hospital bills, I have the burden of paying off all of my college expenses. With this scholarship, I will better be able to fund college expenses and research to make this aspiration become a reality, especially given my strong work ethic. I graduated 18th out of 482 students in my high school class with a 4.8 GPA. I took part in the Accelerated Math and Science program, which provides students the opportunity to advance faster, allowing more math and science classes to be completed throughout high school upon a test entry. Even more impressive, I received my Associate of Science degree from Paris Junior College with a 4.0 before I even finished high school. Through juggling college classes and high school classes at the same time and excelling through them, I have gained so many essential skills that will contribute positively to what was once a distant dream. Problem-solving, communication, creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking are a few of them, and they are all crucial for analyzing, exploring, and discussing the potential world-changing solutions at hand. And on top of all that, I've accumulated an enormous amount of coding knowledge, which will advance my understanding of artificial intelligence and bring me one step closer.
Now that you know the life-changing progress I wish to make in the healthcare sector and how I plan to go about that, let’s talk about how technology will affect progress on the healthcare ecosystem of the world. Health information technology presents numerous opportunities for improving and transforming healthcare. This includes vital contributions, like reducing human errors, improving clinical outcomes, facilitating care coordination, improving practice efficiencies, and tracking data over time.
Taking this into account, digital technology in healthcare and medicine has the potential to change inadequate healthcare systems into adequate ones, offer less expensive, quicker, and more effective ways to treat diseases (like AIDS or Ebola), and level the playing field between medical professionals and patients. We could use technology to live healthier lives and contribute to healthier communities.
Artificial intelligence is a potent instrument that will completely transform the healthcare industry. With the ability to mine medical records, AI algorithms can design treatment plans, develop drugs quicker than any current doctor, and even diagnose cancerous and noncancerous tissue samples. As demonstrated by Google's DeepMind AI development, it can more accurately detect breast cancer than real life doctors. On pre-cleared sets of data, the new technology outperformed human radiologists by 11.5 percent in identifying breast cancer.
3D printing works wonders in healthcare. Blood vessels, prosthetic limbs, bio tissues, and even medicines can all be printed, and this list will indefinitely expand in the future. To my surprise, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researchers developed a technique for 3D-printing living skin and blood arteries, which is crucial for burn victims and prosthetics. If it can complete tasks such as these, just imagine the contributions and impact it will make later on.
Virtual reality shows enormous benefits, although it may not seem like it. One of its many uses is to train future surgeons and for qualified surgeons to practice operations, showing promising results. In UCLA’s recent clinical validation study, VR-trained surgeons saw a 230% increase in their overall performance than traditionally-trained colleagues. Patients are also beneficiaries of this advancement in technology, especially considering pain management. Patients diagnosed with cardiac, neurological, and post-surgical pain have shown a decrease in their anxiety and pain levels when using VR as a stimuli. Since this has already shown enormous benefits to the overall healthcare experience, the healthcare ecosystem of the world will see great progress in the future.
Since augmented reality allows users to not lose touch with reality, it is becoming the driving force in the future of healthcare. It not only aids medical students to better prepare for real-life operations, but also allows surgeons to improve their capabilities. Magic Leap is currently developing a mixed reality headset, where they collaborated with XRHealth to develop SyncThink, a therapeutic platform for brain health. Although no commercial products have been brought to the market, these are bound to populate the healthcare market in the future.
With nanotechnology, nanodevices can operate as accurate drug delivery systems, surgeons, or cancer treatment tools in the near future. For example, MIT researchers developed an electronic pill that is wirelessly controlled and relays analysis information or releases drugs in response to smartphone orders. It even plays a role in smart patches, which allows for continual monitoring of wounds or faster healing of wounds. As if we haven’t seen enough, evolving technology will allow for far more physical examples of nanotechnology in the future, including the possibility of remote-controlled capsules.
Robot developments can be seen as disinfectant robots or even exoskeletons serving as surgical robots. With the very first exoskeleton-aided surgery in 2019, an exoskeleton was controlled using only the tetraplegic patient’s brain. As technologies evolve, robots will function more autonomously, eventually performing certain tasks entirely on their own. As a result, doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers will be able to spend more time providing direct patient care. With this, robotics is one of the fastest-growing and most exciting fields of medicine, so it’s exciting to see what the future of healthcare in this aspect will hold.
The future of medicine is already beginning to take shape thanks to advancements in digital healthcare technologies like AI, 3D printing, VR, AR, nanotechnology, and robotics. The best alternative is to familiarize people with our most recent developments in order to regulate technology, not the other way around. We are at an inventive period for medicine right now, all thanks to the development of technology like these. To embrace the changes in the healthcare industry and remain relevant for years to come, medicine's future depends on collaborating with technology and clinicians.
