New Delhi, Feb. 20 -- Former Deputy Director-General of the World Health Organisation, Soumya Swaminathan, on Friday said artificial intelligence can have a significant positive impact on healthcare, especially in regions where specialist doctors are scarce.

She noted that in many parts of India and in regions such as Africa, there is a shortage of radiologists, psychiatrists and pathologists. Swaminathan said one of the simplest and most effective uses of AI is image and pattern recognition, which can help in reading X-rays and pathology slides, provided the algorithms are trained on high-quality datasets.

"AI can have a lot of very positive impact in healthcare, particularly since we know that we have a lot of places in India as well ...