Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize healthcare by enabling personalized medicine. This approach involves customizing treatment based on an individual’s unique medical and lifestyle profile. AI-powered personalized medicine can help doctors optimize medication dosage and screen patients using their individual health data, leading to earlier diagnosis and prevention and better treatment.
Cambridge University’s lab focuses on developing AI tools for researchers, doctors, nurses, and patients. Their lab is closely working with clinicians and hospitals to create data models of individual patients or digital twins, which can help researchers conduct preliminary trials before expensive ones involving real people. This reduces the time and investment in creating drugs and makes more life-enhancing interventions commercially viable.
In complex healthcare organizations like the NHS, AI can help allocate resources efficiently by predicting the use of ventilators and ICU beds. AI technologies can also support doctors, nurses, and other health professionals to improve their knowledge and combine their expertise better. Additionally, AI can help with patient privacy concerns by creating synthetic data that reflects data patterns while replacing all identifiable information.
While AI has immense potential, it also comes with risks and challenges. For instance, language models like ChatGPT cannot understand complex conditions and nuances, which may lead to misinterpretations or inappropriate recommendations. Moreover, AI used to diagnose someone may get it wrong, and it needs to be clear who is responsible for the mistake – AI developers or healthcare professionals using it.
To address these challenges, ethical guidelines and regulations must catch up with AI technology. AI models must be trained on reliable, accurate, and unbiased data. AI systems need to be validated to ensure they are safe, reliable, and effective, and generate predictions and recommendations that both clinicians and patients can understand. Additionally, AI must not be used to replace humans but instead empower them to become better learners and decision-makers.
In conclusion, AI-powered personalized medicine has the potential to revolutionize healthcare by enabling customized treatments based on patients’ unique medical and lifestyle data. While AI can help with many challenges faced by healthcare organizations, it is crucial to address the risks and challenges associated with AI by developing ethical guidelines and regulations. The human AI empowerment agenda should focus on using AI to empower humans, not replace them.
