Question: How do you believe advancements in artificial intelligence can specifically enhance or revolutionize diagnostic processes and patient care within the medical field?"

Carl Peter Robinson answered on 31 Jan 2024:

We’re already seeing use of AI tools and systems coming into, or being trialled in, the medical field. Several types of AI model have proven extremely capable in the field of computer vision. This can therefore be applied to areas of the medical field that perform scans of patients, resulting in images that doctors then analyse for possible illness and disease. These AI models are a perfect fit for such a task. An AI tool has already proven very capable of detecting some types of cancer when given patient CT scans (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/30/artificial-intelligence-tool-identify-cancer-ai). And there are further examples online, of the adoption of this technology (e.g.: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-50857759).

Additionally, you can apply specialist AI tools to other kinds of patient data, such as blood pressure, heart rate, weight, and so much more (e.g.: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-67134503). As a caveat, there could be issues around GDPR and the protection of patient privacy around that data, which should always be adhered to. Furthermore, these systems will require thorough testing to validate and verify their results meet suitable levels of performance.

I see these systems getting more capable as AI model development advances. Their ability to detect specific types of health anomaly and the accuracy with which they can do it will improve greatly.

Further down the road, you could imagine multimodal AI tools. This type of system can take several types of medical data input to get a “big picture” of a patients’ 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. Imagine robot doctors visiting you at home! (https://news.mit.edu/2021/robotic-doctor-will-see-you-now-0304). I think there could be a drive towards deploying systems like these as part of regular health checks for everyone, as part of a strategy of “prevention over cure”. In this scenario, the idea is to regularly monitor the health of someone to identify potential problems that person might have in the near future. Any potential problem that is identified can then be checked and a have a course of action put into place, to try to prevent the problem from fully manifesting.