A recent medical meeting I attended included multiple sessions on the use of artificial intelligence (AI), a mere preview, I suspect, of what is to come for both patients and physicians.
I vow not to be a contrarian, but I have concerns. If we'd known how cell phones would permeate nearly every waking moment of our lives, would we have built in more protections from the onset?
Although anyone can see the enormous potential of AI in medicine, harnessing the wonders of it without guarding against the dangers could be paramount to texting and driving.
A palpable disruption in the common work-a-day human interaction is a given. CEOs who mind the bottom line will seek every opportunity to cut personnel whenever machine learning can deliver. As our dependence on algorithms increases, our need to understand electrocardiogram interpretation and echocardiographic calculations will wane. Subtle case information will go undetected. Nuanced subconscious alerts regarding the patient condition will go unnoticed.
These realities are never reflected in the pronouncements of companies who promote and develop AI.
The 2-Minute Echo
In September 2020, Carolyn Lam, MBBS, PhD, and James Hare, MBA, founders of the AI tech company US2.AI, told Healthcare Transformersthat AI advances in echocardiology will turn "a manual process of 30 minutes, 250 clicks, with up to 21% variability among fully trained sonographers analyzing the same exam, "into an "AI-automated process taking 2 minutes, 1 click, with 0% variability."
