October 7, 2024 Evolution in AI is fast, promising and could revolutionise ophthalmological decision-making. Image credit: ©alastis – stock.adobe.com Don’t be mistaken: artificial intelligence (AI) has been around, and used in medicine, for quite a long time. If you make a query in Pubmed, you will find AI mentioned in papers dating back to 1953.
AI refers to software programmes which mimic human cognitive functions like reasoning, conclusion and decision-making. In recent years, AI has become more and more mature. Superior computer chips paved the way to superior machine learning and deep learning. It has now the true potential to have a great impact on our society altogether, and medicine in particular.
In looking closely at AI we discover a gradation in “intelligence” for these programmes. We can have the simplest programmes like automated detectors, where patterns in data yield an outcome ( diagnosis). These are useful in automated blood screening programmes. The AI software does that by processing large amounts of data and recognising patterns in this vast amount of data. Patterns may not even be clear or explainable to the investigators.
One of the most-heard concerns is that AI behaves as a “black box”. This has been addressed by Juan Durán and Karin Jongsma in the Journal of Medical Ethics , "Who is afraid of black box algorithms?" in which they discussed issues such as potential bias, accountability, responsibility, patient autonomy and compromised trust with so-called black box algorithms.
More complex and advanced is machine learning AI where the machine is trained to navigate a dataset and detect by itself the important features that guide towards a diagnosis. Numerous examples have shown clinicians that good predictability with the training set does not automatically mean good predictability in real-life situations, so these types of AI still need thorough supervision by a human expert. Finally, there are deep learning neural networks that try to closely mimic the very complex decision-making processes of which our human brain is capable.
We can say that current AI programmes are just arriving in the second stage. But evolution in AI is very fast and promising, and could even […]
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