AI in medicine

Question 1

What are some existing uses of AI in medicine?

Answer 1

• Medical diagnosis: assessing IVF embryo fertilisation success & detecting cancer at early stages.
• Radiotherapy: creating specific individual doses based off a person’s scans.

Question 2

What are the advantages of using robots in surgery?

Answer 2

• 5-fold decrease in surgical complications.

Question 3

How has the NHS planned to integrate Alexa?

Answer 3

• Health information available by voice search.
• Benefit blind, elderly etc

Question 4

Does AI pose a threat to privacy and confidentiality, informed consent and/or patient autonomy?

Answer 4

• It could, the involvement of large multinational companies could pose a risk to data safety.
• AI companies e.g ChatGPT have already been accused of accessing information about people illegally.
• Amazon have made assurances regarding their involvement, claiming it would be kept encrypted and confidential.
• AI cannot substitute for the human side of medicine e.g difficult conversations.