How Artificial Intelligence Could

Transform Medicine
Anahad O’Connor - March 11, 2019

In “Deep Medicine,” Dr. Eric Topol looks at the ways that A.I. could improve health care, and where it
might stumble.
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Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist and the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational
Institute, has long heralded this convergence of technology and medicine. Now, in a new book called
“Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again,” Dr. Topol explores
how A.I. is likely to transform almost everything that doctors do.

Paragraph 1
The No. 1 line item of health care cost in America is human resources, which has recently grown to
be the leading job source for our economy. By augmenting human performance, A.I. has the
potential to markedly improve productivity, efficiency, work flow, accuracy and speed, both for
doctors and for patients, giving more charge and control to consumers through algorithmic support
of their data.

Paragraph 2
There are a few key areas. One is machine pattern recognition to promote the rapid and accurate
reading of medical scans, slides, skin lesions, the pickup of small polyps during colonoscopy, and
much more. Another is keyboard liberation, or using natural language processing of speech to
synthesize notes and eliminate the ultimate source of distraction and dislike in medical encounters.
A.I. can also predict key outcomes for both patients and clinicians to promote prevention.

Paragraph 3
There’s no shortage of deep liabilities for A.I. in health care. The liabilities include breaches of privacy
and security, hacking, the lack of explainability of most A.I. algorithms, the potential to worsen
inequities, the embedded bias and ethical quandaries.

Paragraph 4

Absolutely not. I wrote about a new role for radiologists, whereby they come out of the basement
and have direct interactions with patients. We can’t, and will never, rely on only algorithms for
interpretation of life and death matters. That requires human expert contextualization, something
machines can’t do.

Paragraph 5
I don’t think there’s a standout just yet. For start-ups, I admire the way AliveCor, with their Mayo
Clinic collaboration, was able to develop deep learning algorithms to determine a person’s blood
potassium levels via a smartwatch ECG signal. For tech titans, Google AI and its DeepMind division
has done some impressive work that includes accurately triaging urgent eye conditions, predicting
outcomes in the hospital setting, and an important prospective study of pathology slides in cancer.

Paragraph 6

There are emerging data to support this possibility, such as avoiding glucose spikes after eating,
which are highly individualized, much more common than anticipated, and related to the specific
foods we take in and our gut microbiomes. It’s still early but definitely getting traction from ongoing
work.

Paragraph 7

No way. A.I. can help the precision of delicate microsurgery, as we have already seen with the retina.
There will be better robots for surgery than we have now. But that won’t obviate the need for human
surgeons. It will just augment their performance. Would you want your surgery to be done by a
robot?

Paragraph 8

Yes, but not via your Instagram posts! For the first time we’ve got real-time, objective metrics for
state of mind and mood like tone of speech, breathing pattern, smartphone keystrokes and
communication, and physical activity. And we’ve learned people would rather share their innermost
secrets with an avatar compared with a human being. So, the landscape is ripe for A.I. to help
alleviate the profound shortage of health professionals compared with the enormous burden of
depression and other mental health conditions.

Paragraph 9

What I’m most excited about is using the future to bring back the past: To restore the care in health
care. By giving both the gift of time to clinicians, who are at peak levels ever recorded for burnout
and depression, and empowerment to patients, for those who want it, this will ultimately be
possible. But it will require substantial activism of the medical community to stand up for patients
and not allow the jump in productivity to further squeeze clinicians, upending the erosion of the
doctor-patient relationship.

Adapted from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/well/live/how-artificial-intelligence-could-

transform-medicine.html