Artificial Intelligence has moved from science fiction to everyday reality in a matter of years, being used for everything from online activity to driving cars.
Even, yes, to make medical diagnoses. But that doesn't mean people are ready to let AI drive all their medical decisions.
The technology is quickly evolving to help guide clinical decisions across more medical specialties and diagnoses, particularly when it comes to identifying anything out of the ordinary during a colonoscopy, skin cancer check, or in an X-ray image.
New research is exploring what patients think about the use of AI in health care. Yale University's Sanjay Aneja, MD, and colleagues surveyed a nationally representative group of 926 patients about their comfort with the use of the technology, what concerns they have, and on their overall opinions about AI.
Turns out, patient comfort with AI depends on its use.
For example, 12% of the people surveyed were “very comfortable” and 43% were "somewhat comfortable" with AI reading chest X-rays. But only 6% were very comfortable and 25% were somewhat comfortable about AI making a cancer diagnosis , according to the survey results published online May 4 in the journal JAMA Network Open.
"Having an AI algorithm read your X-ray … that's a very different story than if one is relying on AI to make a diagnosis about a malignancy or delivering the news that somebody has cancer," says Sean Khozin, MD, who was not involved with the research.
"What's very interesting is that … there's a lot of optimism among patients about the role of AI in making things better. That level of optimism was great to see," says Khozin, an oncologist and data scientist, who’s a member of the executive committee at the Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare (AAIH). The AAIH is a global advocacy organization in Baltimore that focuses on responsible, ethnical, and reasonable standards for the use of AI and machine learning in health care.
All in Favor, Say AI
Most people had a positive overall opinion on AI in health care. The survey revealed that 56% believe AI will make health care better in the next 5 years, compared to 6% who say it will make health care worse.
Most of the work in medical AI focuses on clinical areas that could benefit most, "but rarely do we ask ourselves which areas patients really want AI to impact their health care," says Aneja, a senior study author and assistant professor at Yale School of Medicine.
Not considering the patient views leaves an incomplete picture.
"In many ways, I would say our work highlights a potential blind spot among AI researchers that will need to be addressed as these technologies become more common in clinical practice," says Aneja.
