The Future of AI in Healthcare: Opportunities and Challenges

[esytest5]

As the field of artificial intelligence (Ai) continues to advance, its impact on healthcare becomes increasingly prominent. From diagnostic support to personalized treatment plans, AI holds great promise in revolutionizing the healthcare industry. However, with these opportunities come challenges, such as data privacy, ethical concerns, and algorithm bias. How do you envision the future of AI in healthcare? What are the key opportunities and hurdles that we must address? Let's discuss and explore the potential of AI tranform helathcare on Hacker News!

[gaudystead]

I'm actually getting ready to speak on this at a conference coming up soon and am pretty excited about the future of healthcare, specifically in the United States because that's where my research has mostly been focused (and where I live).

One of the first things I'm interested in the future of is more in the near term future, and that's AI's ability to connect patients with doctors more appropriately suited to diagnose and care for patients, especially ones with unique/rare illnesses. One other near term benefit from using AI would be that the computer can take over medical billing for the doctor, allowing them more time to meet & treat patients versus filling out paperwork.

In the long term, I could see AI being leveraged with medical records to diagnose an illness based on symptoms & medical history. Already, some AI models are outperforming doctors in terms of accuracy of diagnosis, but it's not across the board just yet. This will be a double-edged sword though because, although this may expand access to care for many people (ESPECIALLY if it means lower costs being passed onto patients), it will also likely make meeting with a human doctor much more difficult. Will a computer be better at diagnosing across the board and humans only necessary for edge cases, or will humans still be needed to validate AI decisions into the foreseeable future? Empathy is not programmed into these algorithms, so a doctor may make a choice that is better for the patient overall, but incongruous with what the computer would suggest for a care plan.

Another exciting space is the use of visual AI models for early detection of cancer and other illnesses where even a trained human might not notice early indications of illness. Earlier treatment will lead to better patient outcomes, so the sooner a tumor is noticed, the sooner it can be mitigated.

The entire field is rapidly developing and things seem to be changing about as quickly as "AI" in general, so I'm excited to see where things go!

[mattbgates]

My grandfather, rest his soul, had survived a colon cancer surgery, though it was found out he didn't have colon cancer. Would've been nice to have AI reading into his diagnosis to possibly determine that it was just a polyp. The chemo radiation pills they had him on -- although it is a blameless incident that happened -- are likely what sped up his organ failure and eventual downfall.

However, focusing on the surgery that he had: it was a robotic arm that made the incisions and a surgeon was controlling the arm. Obviously, there are benefits to using a robot arm in a surgery than humans hands. For our more common surgeries, I believe AI will likely be trained on hundreds and thousands of human bodies for the most common surgeries and be able to perform them, knowing human anatomy, and what it is touching. Imagine AI freeing surgeons up on thousands of hours of surgery with just a surgeon or two in the room along with a anethesiologist to oversee everything.

Human error is the most common type of error that still causes thousands of hospital deaths every year and I believe AI could easily reduce a lot of these mistakes that are happening, whether it is dosage of medication or a reminder about tools or gauzes being left inside of a human body after surgery.

In addition, AI could determine patterns of behavior in patients which can be helpful to nurses to reduce stress or feeling overworked either by reducing their own workload or pointing out common mistakes or errors. I'd like to think that many incidents that lead to infections, further surgeries, or even accidental deaths could be reduced if nurses had that assistance.

As far as AI in the pharma world... a group could be swallowing pills meant to deliver drugs that work, but within those pills are computer chips that might be capable of reading everything they went through in the human body and helping us understand how those specific drugs work, with AI understanding how medicine travels through the body and specific targetting.

The possibilities of AI are endless. The only issue with AI as I've seen it right now: AI doesn't care what's going on. It needs human input. I know there are some engineers/developers/programmers/top tech companies that already seen the problem with this. Humans have this natural instinct to want to learn and the ability to do it. AI only cares about what you ask it, only because you asked it. So answering those philosophical questions and seeking additional information and why could help us.

For example, doctors have to make final calls to try and save a life or end it everyday, so AI coming up with potential scenarios and calculating the risks and potentials could advance our medical field, especially in calculating whether surgeries are a big risk or not.

My grandfather survived his surgery after I had fought to get two hospitals to talk to each other over the course of eight months to make it happen, based on the recommendation of a doctor. He, unfortunately, didn't have all the information that he should have from the other doctor and approved of the surgery. While one hospital was willing and the other was not, but the damages from the first hospital carried to the second. Due to the first hospital being stubborn with multiple doctors saying no to the surgery and instead wanting keeping him on chemo pills for the rest of his life, wasting that precious time, only to finally get the surgery, and while the surgery was successful, it just ended up being too much for his body, and he only lived another three months.

I do wonder if AI could've stepped in to help us understand what his risks were initially, but it was a total reliance on his doctors reading his charts to determine it. Again opening up the potential for human error.

So much potential for AI to further advance humanity beyond what we've seen and I can't wait to see AI being used more for different operations in the hospitals.