The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has come up with the country’s first Ethical Guidelines for the Application of Artificial Intelligence in Biomedical Research and Healthcare. The aim of these guidelines is to provide an ethical framework to ensure the development, deployment and adoption of AI-based solutions for biomedical research and healthcare. The document, drafted by the Department of Health Research and ICMR’s Artificial Intelligence Cell, “AI for health”, addresses potential biases, data handling, interpretational risks, confidentiality, and the associated ethical principles concerning Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning-based tools.
NTAGI chief Dr N K Arora said, “It is therefore imperative to have an ethical framework that addresses issues specific to AI for biomedical research and healthcare. The adoption of AI technology in healthcare is growing in India and these guidelines will serve to provide the ethical framework for the development of AI-based tools which will benefit all stakeholders, including innovators, developers, patients, technologists, researchers, healthcare professionals, ethics committees, sponsors and funding agencies involved in research related to AI in biomedical research and healthcare”.
The guidelines include sections on guiding ethical principles for AI in health, principles for stakeholders, the ethics review process, governance of artificial intelligence for healthcare and research, and the informed consent process involving human participants and their data.
The adoption of AI-based solutions has the potential to be the solution for significant challenges like diagnosis and screening, therapeutics, preventive treatments, clinical decision-making, public health surveillance, complex data analysis, and predicting disease outcomes.
In conclusion, the ICMR’s first Ethical Guidelines for the Application of Artificial Intelligence in Biomedical
Research and Healthcare provide an ethical framework to ensure the development, deployment and adoption of AI-based solutions are as beneficial as possible, while upholding the associated ethical principles. It is hoped that these will assist innovators, developers, patients, technologists, researchers, healthcare professionals, ethics committees, sponsors and funding agencies involved in research related to AI in biomedical research and healthcare.
