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Asked by base498huh on 2 Feb 2024.
Question: Do you think in the future we will have AI healthcare and doctors?
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Gerard Canal answered on 2 Feb 2024:
I believe we’ll have AI systems helping doctors and nurses improve the care they provide. And, in fact, this is already happening, and it’s often the case that AI systems are used to analyse medical images in case the doctor missed something so they can have another look!
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Carl Peter Robinson answered on 2 Feb 2024: last edited 2 Feb 2024 1:21 pm
There is progress towards this type of human-AI interaction in healthcare already. Currently, we have a few AI tools that have been created to perform one specific task, such as scanning images of lungs to look for signs of cancer, and they’re pretty good at it.
I think there will also be AI systems that will be deployed in a multimodal setting. This type of system can take several types of medical data input to get a “big picture” of a patient’s current health status. Such systems could aid doctors in their assessment tasks, in hospitals or at a local GP surgery, or even at home, eventually.
There is research into using these AI systems in robots that can be used to visit patients in hospital (or perhaps even at home one day!) to take scans, to help human medical staff with their workload (https://news.mit.edu/2021/robotic-doctor-will-see-you-now-0304).
There are also some existing robotic medicine delivery systems being deployed in one or two hospitals (https://news.ashp.org/News/feature-stories/2023/11/14/robots-speed-delivery-of-meds-in-hospitals). This could likely become more common in the future.
Note, that all these systems are used as tools to help human medical staff do their jobs. I think that will continue to be the case, even as these tools improve and become more prevalent. The majority of decisions will always be made by humans.
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Fergus M commented on :
We’re already using AI for a number of tasks but it’s as a support to the staff, not as a way to replace them. A good example is the use of AI to analyse mammograms – the AI filters out the really normal and really abnormal images and allows the radiologist to concentrate on the ‘difficult’ images where their expertise is of maximum benefit.
Where AI may come into it’s own is in the analysis of large datasets. We’re almost unique in the UK in that all our health data is available through a single entity, ie the NHS, and this is a very powerful tool for looking for trends and links to particular diseases. AI can analyse this far faster and more efficiently than humans, so may well lead on this in the future. It’s already doing this to develop new drugs by filtering through millions of options to extract those of most promise.