What is the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine

Over the past years, the application of technology in medicine has been constantly growing. In fact, technology innovations are essential in the medical field to help better assist doctors, physicians, and surgeons. Currently, “we still face massive challenges in detecting and diagnosing several life-threatening illnesses, such as infectious diseases and cancer”. The use of Artificial Intelligence in the healthcare system, however, can drastically change the way our society receives treatments due to its boundless capabilities to store, process and analyze data than our traditional visit to the doctors. Although there are still many ethical issues and problems with AI, its ongoing research and innovations will soon resolve the problems and work its way into the medical field to benefit our society. The primary task as a doctor is to diagnose diseases accurately and then to suggest the best and appropriate treatment for the patients. However, this is still a big challenge.

First of all, if a patient, for example, comes into a clinic complaining about fever and diarrhea, it could be the result of a food poisoning. But these symptoms could also result from “a stomach virus, cholera, dysentery, malaria, cancer or some unknown new disease” This means that there are many common symptoms among different illness which makes it difficult for doctors to accurately examine a patient. Secondly, there are many patients but limited doctors which gives little time for the examiners to question and diagnosis a patient carefully. This leads to a less reliable and accurate treatment. Thirdly, a doctor does not have the ability to remember every detail of all the patient’s history, be an expert on every illness and drugs, nor be updated with new research found every day. Moreover, doctors are also humans which means that they sometimes can feel tired, sick or hungry which affect their judgments when treating patients.

Lastly, visiting a clinic can sometimes be extremely expensive and time-consuming. Patients have to visit different specialist just to get a treatment which can be critical especially for patients whose diseases must be treated immediately. With these challenges in the medical field, the utilization of Artificial Intelligence will drastically improve the healthcare system as well as the overall wellness of our society. For example, Pratik Shah from MIT Media Lab is developing a variety of unorthodox AI architectures by using as little as 50 medical images which can then be converted into billions of training data points. In addition, to reduce the use of expensive medical imaging technologies, they came up with a way to utilize cell phone photos along with the collected data points to diagnosis patients. Unlike the traditional AI, which is “data-rich but application-poor”, this new form of AI will be more effective in treating patients. These technologies are very beneficial for our society. Not only it will reduce the cost for patients, but it will also speed up the treatment process with a higher rate of accuracy for curing the illness. For example, consider the IBM’s famous Watson, an artificial intelligence system that beats the former human champions and won the Jeopardy in 2011.

An AI such as Watson has many advantages over humans. First of all, it has the capacity to store unlimited information, process through massive data, and analyze those stored materials. This is the perfect solution to conquer the extensive knowledge about medicine and diseases. Next, an AI will never have human emotions such as laziness, stress, hunger or sickness. Therefore, the treatment will not be affected by the specialist and it will be consistent among their patients with similar symptoms. Moreover, unlike a doctor who requires many years of training just to be an expert on one topic, an AI can be produced quickly. Because there are more AI available for patients, people can spend more time discussing their illness.

Lastly, this system has a higher accuracy in diagnosing a patient than a human doctor. For example, a recent experiment by Chief Medical Officer of WellPoint, Samuel R. Nussbaum performed an experiment which showed that a computer algorithm can correctly diagnose 90 percent of lung cancer cases whereas the human doctors have only a 50 percent success rate. (SITE) Overall, there are countless advantages that can be obtained by incorporating the AI into the healthcare system. Although there are many advantages to the utilization of AI, there are still many ethical challenges that must be considered. For example, job displacement is one of the top fears that our society faces with the increasing reliance on technology. As different innovations in automation emerge, people fear that there will be no need for human labor and that unemployment rates will go up. However, this is not the case. For example, the 19th century Industrial Revolution has drastically changed the way people perform work. It has increased our economy drastically and opened more jobs that are less labor intensive.

These innovations took over the physically intensive jobs and instead, created rooms for people to achieve more cognitive labors. Furthermore, it gives employees people time to “find meaning in non-labor activities, such as caring for their families, engaging with their communities and learning new ways to contribute to human society. Another issue that arises from automation is AI bias. “Data used to create algorithms can contain bias that is reflected in the algorithms and in the clinical recommendations they generate. ” In addition, these algorithms can be biased depending on who developed the system, the companies that produced them, as well as the motive of the programmer. Some researchers worry that racial discrimination could go into healthcare algorithms due to the unavailability of inclusive data. Therefore, many research and improvements are still ongoing to solve different challenges that arise along with AI implication if people want to depend more on technology.

All in all, the overall advantages in using AI to improve the healthcare system outweigh the disadvantages. Although there are still many more improvements and researches ongoing to solve the problems that arise from AI, it will soon be a great tool that can come into reality in the future. The medical field can greatly improve as AI becomes more reliable and effective. Not only can the accuracy in treating patients increase, but the treatments will also be more affordable. Most importantly patients can receive treatments in as little time which increases their chance of survival. Although there are still ethical issues such as the fear of unemployment and AI bias, soon these problems can be solved in near future due to the ongoing researches. The society will be hugely benefited if AI can complement the work of medical professionals.