Regulations need to be introduced to balance development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in healthcare with the ethical considerations of handling sensitive medical data, a forum heard.
Doctors and IT professionals yesterday discussed the applications and ramifications of AI and robotics in various medical fields at the Manama Health Congress and Expo, being held at Exhibition World Bahrain in Sakhir.
“The use of software and computing in healthcare has challenged developers, governments and providers for half a century, and AI poses additional, novel, ethical challenges that extend beyond the purview of traditional regulators and participants in healthcare systems,” Arab Hospitals Federation general secretary Professor Dr Tawfik Khoja noted during his presentation.
“These ethical challenges must be adequately addressed if AI is to be widely used to improve human health, preserve human autonomy and ensure equitable access to such technologies.”
Dr Khoja noted that the technology is complex and carries potential pitfalls and inherent biases, emphasising that widespread use of autonomous and intelligent machines can increase systemic risks of harm, increase the possibility of errors and amplify ethical and societal issues.
For a regulatory framework, he pointed to the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) six core principles on the ethics and governance of AI for health, released in May this year.
According to WHO, organisations, when designing, developing and deploying AI, must “protect autonomy; promote human well-being, human safety, and the public interest; ensure transparency, explainability, and intelligibility; foster responsibility and accountability; ensure inclusiveness and equity; and promote AI that is responsive and sustainable.”
Meanwhile, other lecturers showcased the various ways AI was being integrated with existing cutting-edge technology like Augmented Reality (AR) to assist in surgeries.
George Washington University clinical associate professor of obstetrics and gynaecology Dr Gaby Moawad cited the example of how AR has been used for a number of years to train medical students on surgeries, and how real-time AR can now enhance robotic devices to help surgeons increase their precision and reduce the chances of complications.
He, however, emphasised that there are dangers around fully autonomous surgical robots since surgeries are often done in highly complex environments where human decision-making is critical to ensuring the best possible outcome for patients.
King Abdulaziz University’s medical director Professor Sattam Saud Lingawi, when talking about AI applications in radiology and image analysis, called AI “a clinical decision support system that assists radiologists”, emphasising that it was a tool for developing better insights as well as supporting research and innovation.
He noted that as of 2020, in an average 12-hour radiology shift, radiologists are required to sift through an average of 50,000 images, up from 5,000 images in 2010.
“AI can assist in sifting through this medical data,” he said.
He also predicted that there would be a global shortage of 40 million healthcare providers by 2035, up from 7m in 2020.
While he noted that AI could help bridge this gap and Dr Moawad added that AI could, in the long term, make surgery more accessible for poorer countries, Dr Lingawi stressed that hospitals should not rely solely on AI interpretations and recommendations, thereby risking the de-skilling of human experts.
To feed AI algorithms with valuable data to train with, Dr Lingawi underlined the amount of medical data – approximately 800,000 peer-reviewed medical articles per year – that could help train these systems and save many of the approximately 40m people globally who die every year due to medical and diagnostic errors.
Bahrain’s AI Society head and International Group of Artificial Intelligence president Dr Jassim Haji presented a number of other ways that AI could be used in healthcare, including for disease prediction, drug discovery and personalised treatment plans.
“AI can be used to analyse a patient’s genetic data, medical history and lifestyle factors to create personalised treatment plans that can help improve the effectiveness of treatment and reduce the risk of side effects,” Dr Haji added.
The Manama Health Congress and Expo will end today with sessions on gene therapy and aesthetic medicine.
naman@gdnmedia.bh
Healthcare issues – Page 6
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