Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a field of computer science that focuses on creating machines that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence.
AI can help clinical diagnosis in several ways, as shown below:
- Medical image analysis: AI algorithms can analyse X-rays, MRIs, ultrasounds, CT scans, and DXAs to help healthcare providers find patterns and relationships that are hard to see. AI-powered medical imaging can distinguish diseases from healthy parts and signals from noise in medical reports.
- Personalised treatment plans: AI-based methods can analyse a patient’s medical history, genetics, and other factors to create personalised treatment plans that improve patient outcomes. Machine learning technologies can identify hidden or complex patterns in x-ray imagery, which could reduce referral wait times for high-risk patients and ease clinic workloads .
- Rare diagnoses and unusual presentations: AI could identify rare diagnoses or unusual presentations in complex cases that clinicians struggle to diagnose.
- AI chatbots can diagnose medical conditions at home and recommend treatments. Early tests suggest these chatbots are more accurate than Google searches.
- Disease detection and management: AI can detect brain changes indicative of Alzheimer’s disease and stroke, analyse the heart’s electrical activity to spot current problems and predict future events, diagnose osteoporosis and fracture risk from hip X-rays, and identify diseases earlier to improve outcomes.
Threat to privacy of the individual in the use of Al in healthcare
- AI in healthcare in India raises concerns about patient health data privacy. Private companies own and control many AI technologies, raising implementation and data security privacy concerns.
- AI in healthcare in India raises privacy and other issues. Lack of ethical guidelines for AI and ML in healthcare can lead to covert data collection and serious privacy issues.
- Data security and privacy concerns arise with AI-based systems. Hackers target vulnerable health records during data breaches. Therefore, medical record confidentiality is essential.
- For years, experts have raised ethical concerns about healthcare data storage and security, and AI is adding to that conversation every day. The largest social media platform stores and acts on mental health data without legal protections using AI. Health data privacy, ethics, and human rights are at stake.
Healthcare organizations must follow privacy principles to avoid data breaches and misuse of sensitive patient data. To protect patient privacy, ethical AI and ML use in healthcare must be standardized.