AI in healthcare: Should we fear or be fearless of it?

While AI can offer tall doable to toughen patient outcomes and streamline scientific processes, draw flaws can pose dangers to ethics, security and records accuracy.

Dr Gao Yujia, assistant community CTO of the Nationwide University Successfully being System, instructed warning in AI implementation in healthcare within the keynote session, “Unveiling the Dark Side of AI,” at HIMSS24 APAC.

“While AI has undoubtedly enhanced patient care, it’s crucial to acknowledge the potential pitfalls,” he emphasised.

A fundamental distress is the threat of bias in AI algorithms. Dr Gao cited an incident during COVID-19 where an AI algorithm, professional on biased records, disproportionately down-prioritised other folks of coloration who had the identical stipulations as other patients.

It is miles serious, Dr Gao stressed out, that AI programs are professional on diverse and manual datasets.

“Similar to a ‘garbage in, garbage out’ scenario, AI can only be as accurate as the data that is fed to it. Some AI algorithms fail to perform as expected because they were not trained on relevant data or were overfitted to specific datasets.”

Beyond records quality, Dr Gao also raised concerns relating to the ethical implications of AI in healthcare.

“We use AI to help us organise our thoughts, but that same intent can be used maliciously. For example, AI-generated deepfakes have been used to impersonate healthcare workers for ransomware attacks. Fraudulent medical research is also a possibility because of how convincing AI-generated content can be.”

Requested if all is “doom and gloom” for AI in healthcare, Dr Gao disagreed.

“A more immersive and instantaneous digital world is inevitable, but what protects us [from AI risks] is maintaining a balance between human agency and AI’s utility.”

Per Dr Gao, ethical frameworks, transparency and human oversight are key components in harnessing the vitality of AI whereas mitigating its doable harms.

He instructed healthcare experts to neither dismay AI nor be intrepid of AI.

“We should take a step back to understand, appreciate, understand and plan how to integrate AI into healthcare in our society.”

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