16/09/2025
Artificial Intelligence and Doctor Harsha !
Computation in the last few decades revolutionized everyone’s life. A lot of automation took place and tasks became much easier, for every trade, doctors, engineers, teachers, lawyers, businessman and so forth.
A new term “Artificial Intelligence” coined by John McCarthy in 1955, but became popular in last decade. Specially Geoffrey Hinton contributed a lot the development of deep learning. It is to mimic the neural networks of human intelligence into computers.
Back to Solapur, Maharashtra, India. A doctor friend of mine called last week discussing python installation etc. I was about to have my dinner, but something triggered my mind, I was patiently listening, possibly trying to answer few of his queries. Honestly I couldn’t personally use python with GUI. I attended one day workshop by IIT Mumbai in 2019. It was under the scheme Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya National Mission on Teaching & Teachers. Surprisingly the next morning he called me back and informed he could deploy python, generate the desired code and make .exe that can run on his Windows 10 PC. I was little surprised, doctor Harshawardhan Joshi is practicing intensivist. A healthcare practitioner, MBBS, MD(Intensivist). He has no background of computer programming. It was his first self-developed python program. And has all the basic features an application needs. User needs to enter patient name, age, gender and X-Ray report inputs. He could set few default normal inputs to the variables in the report.He could set desired margins to the report. He could make it to produce .pdf file as output to each patient, in a logical way to save in directory. It took him roughly 6 hours late night.
I went this morning to have details of what is been developed by a MD doctor. It took about half hour to go through his journey of making this application. Quit interesting, the nature of problems he could face were technical and challenging even for a programmer. But with his logical understanding and help from ChatGPT, he could make the application successful. For reference I am showing few screenshots.
Doctor though faced lot of problems right from installation of development platform to practically using it for day-today application. Initially it generated a console application in python. Each time he wanted to make a change it was giving different style of coding. This was confusing for a non-programmer. And not a good practice to build a complete library for application. So he quickly learnt how to use same code-base still solve his issues. He got various types of errors. Right from environment path settings to folder it saves variables and so forth. One after the another he solved most of them taking help of ChatGPT and “Common Sense” and most important logical thinking.
He wanted it to have a graphical user interface instead of console based. For a non-programmer doctor late night it was a challenging issue. He told ChatGPT “want data input in tabs like visual basic”. The ChatGPT till now machine learnt terminologies of doctor Harsha. It explained doctor,it is said graphical user interface and gave sample code of the same. Then he moved ahead into another warship. Yeah, for anon-programmer to match different library versions and getting it compiled a final .exe is bit challenging He again took help of ChatGPT and google to solve all the different platform and settings errors etc. I am writing all this in a single line but for the non-programmer doctor it took few hours of time and battle with version mismatch. The Uninstallation of different versions of different components of development tool for python etc.
At the end of his session doctor Harsha could make an application with GUI. The GUI when clicked shows 3 tabs, First tab takes input of patient demographics. Second and third tab is related to X-Ray Report. This was X-Ray Report for patients. It had few default text inputted when the application starts. It saves .pdf file to a desired folder, with logical file name that has patient name, report name and date the report created etc.
Fast forward 6 hours before doctor Harsha when started. For an average python programmer it may take atleast few weeks of training, skill developing and practicing. And then giving inputs to understand user requirements, changes after each revision. Bug fixes after developer testing and end user testing. I would say it was like a cycle of atleast 3 weeks for a well trained programmer. All that in 6 hours effort of non-programmer doctor. The software development paradigm will definitely needs to accept this change. The learning curve has abruptly changed and programmers including several other experts need to learn better way to use these modern tools of AI.
I do not want to discuss “Ethical” issues of whether one should use AI for programming or for sake any other skills or expertise and/or industry ? But how effectively each profession and industry can utilize thee AI tools. By the way, the ChatGPT that my non-programmer doctor friend using was free available tool and not paid , commercial. May be using paid commercial tool give him better or sophisticated problems solved.
I am impressed with time doctor Harsha invested to try what AI can do for doctors. One other case where a senior cardiologist learnt basics of AI. And he could make a patent of his invention. He plans to make few more of his ideas those use AI to solve cardiology related issues. Surely this will benefit the society.
Doctor Harshawardhan Joshi is chief/CEO of Joshi Clinic Solapur since December 2011. He completed his MBBS from VM GMC Solapur in 2001 and MD(Intensivist) in 2007 from Navi Mumbai. .
Author : Sham Yemul, B.E.(Production), DAC , www.Intellisoft.co.in
Sham is software entrepreneur from Solapur, his company developed several hundred database applications for various types of industry in last 26 years.
