As Covid-19 continues to exacerbate a nationwide healthcare worker shortage, health systems are experimenting with different ways to maximize stretched human resources, including technological solutions. One company that works with health systems believes that AI could help alleviate current labor woes. John Frownfelter, CEO of the Suwanee, Georgia-based artificial intelligence company Jvion said AI can actually improve efficiency in how medicine is practiced. Linked to the Jvion site below to avoid linking "out" up high.] AI has been heavily hyped for years but now, amid the pandemic, achieving operating efficiencies has taken on a new urgency at cash-strapped and short-staffed hospitals.

It is almost 40 years since a full-body magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine was used for the first time to scan a patient and generate diagnostic-quality images. The scanner and signal processing methods needed to produce an image were devised by a team of medical physicists including John Mallard, Jim Hutchinson, Bill Edelstein and Tom Redpath at the University of Aberdeen, leading to the widespread use of the MRI scanner, now a ubiquitous tool in radiology departments across the world. MRI was a game-changer in medical diagnostics because it didn't require exposure to ionising radiation (such as X-rays), and could generate images on multiple cross-sections of the body with superb definition of soft tissues. This allowed, for example, the direct visualisation of the spinal cord for the first time. Most people today will have undergone an MRI or know somebody who has.