Want to consult with an artificial intelligence doctor? – 07/14/2023 – Tech

The promise of artificial intelligence is that it will transform productivity. Nowhere is this more necessary than in healthcare.

With increasingly aging populations, tight spending restrictions, and overburdened professionals in many health systems, a health revolution would be welcome, and the sooner the better.

As written by Dr. Margaret McCartney in an FT Weekend essay marking the 75th anniversary of Britain’s national health service, the NHS, the job of general practitioners today is “essentially unworkable”.

For decades, technologists have promised to transform the health sector, but the results have been mixed. It is a sector full of arrogance, hype and announced advances, but which do not materialize.

In one of the famous examples, IBM boasted that its supercomputer Watson, which in 2011 won the quiz show Jeopardy!, could also provide the solution to cancer, but it turned out that it did not have all the answers.

The public views the use of AI (artificial intelligence) in healthcare with deep distrust. A Pew Research Center poll this year found that 60% of US respondents said they were uncomfortable with the idea of ​​AI being used to diagnose disease or recommend treatments.

Can the latest promise of a technology-driven healthcare revolution accelerated by the emergence of generative AI deliver concrete results this time around?

One expert who believes so is Lloyd Minor, director of Stanford Medical School. He argues that recent advances in artificial intelligence will allow us to do what Watson’s creators envisioned.

AI has long been used in specific areas of healthcare, for example helping to monitor possible drug interactions and analyzing skin lesion imaging. But Minor says that current generative AI models will impact all aspects of healthcare, from patient care and routine administration to medical studies and drug discovery.

According to him, while the internet allows us to access information, generative AI will allow us to assimilate knowledge. “There are tipping points in human history: the conquest of language, print, the internet. I think generative AI is a similar tipping point.”

To make the most of the opportunity, last month Stanford’s medical school partnered with Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence to discuss the ethical and safety issues surrounding the use of AI.

The joint RAISE-Health initiative will track the promising applications of AI in life sciences and healthcare, accelerating research and helping to educate patients and clinicians on responsible uses of the technology.

AI is already opening up possibilities for delivering much more efficient healthcare. One of the areas is surgery. Startup Proximie, founded by surgeon Nadine Hachach-Haram, filmed more than 20,000 procedures —with the consent of doctors and patients—, creating a new resource and digital medical infrastructure.

The company’s mission is to build a global platform that can share best practices in real time and improve training, case reviews and patient safety. Proximie can use generative AI to provide data-rich procedure summaries, track surgical instruments, and generate reports about and for patients.

Hachach-Haram says there’s a lot of talk about AI, but that it should only be used in specific use cases that are proven to benefit patients and medical professionals. His challenge has been to persuade doctors and executives that the technology can produce better results and save money.

However, it has also had to persuade patients that using intrusive technology can benefit their safety while preserving their privacy. “We can use generative AI to safely analyze data,” she said. “Data saves lives.”

Some of the big tech companies, which have a bad reputation when it comes to using personal data, are also training specialized generative AI models for the healthcare industry.

Google is running tests at the Mayo Clinic in the US with the Med-PaLM 2 medical chatbot, which provides expert advice to physicians. The company is rightly wary of releasing this model more widely before its potential shortcomings have been ironed out.

However, one of the researchers who worked on the project is excited about how the technology, once proven, could transform the global healthcare industry.

Vivek Natarajan, an AI researcher at Google Health, recently told the RAAIS (Applied AI and Research foundation) conference in London that growing up in India, he met people who had never seen a doctor in their lives.

“Where will AI have the most impact?” he said. “On access to health.” It will allow us to imagine “a top-notch doctor in the pockets of billions of people.”

It’s an enticing prospect, but in an industry that revolves around organizational complexity, personal sensitivity and making life-and-death decisions, we need to use artificial intelligence judiciously.

Translated by Clara Allain