Doctors are generally quite clear-headed, but can be resistant to change. The most famous example is probably the 19th century refusal to wash hands when passing from the mortuary to the factory. Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, who compiled statistics to show that soap and water could save lives, was ridiculed and shunned.
Today, we live in more enlightened times, and medical practice is generally supported by evidence, but do we always get the right evidence to bring about change? For example, there are signs that bring artificial intelligence in clinical use it can even save lives. as we reported in the section “AI Helps Radiologists Detect Breast Cancer in Real-World Tests”radiologists who chose to use AI to classify images to help detect breast cancer received one additional case for every 1000 people screened. In all health systems, the impact can be significant.
Does this mean we should encourage doctors to hang up their weeds and let the machines take over? Far from it. Although AI systems with high language patterns like ChatGPT can perform multiple choice medical tests, they do not so good at interview diagnostics (see “AI chatbots don’t diagnose patients by talking to them”). A doctor at the bedside with a listening ear is still essential, for now.
We should be bolder in testing AI medical systems in real-world medical settings
Instead, we can draw two conclusions from these studies. The first is that we should be careful when using the generic term “artificial intelligence”. Although the two systems we report share a base neural network technologyimage classification is a very different task to text generation, and the latter has a much greater risk of AI producing plausible but incorrect results. In other words, not all AIs are created equal.
The second implication is that we should be bolder in testing AI medical systems in real-world settings, rather than in the lab or simulations. Breast cancer screening shows that giving radiologists control over when to use AI can be a useful tool. With a push for more evidence like this, lives could be saved, just like Semmelweis, who is now considered a medical hero.
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