By Caleb Wheeler | Staff Writer
Artificial intelligence has officially entered health care in an effort to reduce demands on health care professionals. Recently, ChatGPT joined the field to produce reports, process images and message patients.
Dr. Pablo Rivas, assistant professor of computer science at Baylor, said there are numerous ways AI can be beneficial in medicine.
“If there’s an illness or an epidemic and it fits a genetic profile, certain people are affected by that,” Rivas said. “AI can help me identify people at risk much faster than any human. There are files of people; AI can mine all that data and identify people who are much faster than a doctor, so the doctor can focus on actually reaching out to people. Making searches and imaging is also pretty good for an MRI or CAT scan.”
While the use of AI in health care has spread across the nation, Baylor medical director Dr. Sharon Stern said there are some concerns about the use of AI in such fields.
“AI is actually helpful in report-writing and reading X-rays, but you have to have a human there for several reasons,” Stern said. “AI is educated by a database, so it depends on what that database is. If they just put [AI] on the internet, they’re going to pull up erroneous information; they’re going to pull up a lot of biased, prejudiced information.”
Rivas and Stern both said they see the value of speed, although a person should be monitoring the work of AI to ensure it is producing accurate information.
“AI can make a lot of decisions much faster, but I think as a society, we’re not yet willing to accept the cost of our decision because of liability if a doctor makes the wrong decision,” Rivas said. “If AI is making decisions, who is responsible for that?”
Stern said she is also concerned about the future of the medical field if it starts relying on AI for basic health care tasks.
“Let’s say AI starts doing all this radiology work, and it’s great and there are humans and they’re learning and everything,” Stern said. “But what if we get to the point where all of our young residents and medical students don’t know how to read a report without the AI? And what if the system goes down one day? They’re going to have to close the shop.”
