Kacper Urbański, 1P

Does artificial intelligence have the potential to revolutionize healthcare?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been indubitably an incredibly important invention. It has
revolutionized countless industries and will revolutionize many more, with healthcare being no
exception. AI allows a machine or computer to imitate human capabilities, being at the same time
faster, more precise, and more effective than humans. Artificial intelligence, and more specifically
machine learning, has the potential to enhance healthcare by improving diagnostics, patient
monitoring, and prediction.
The field in which artificial intelligence excels at most is analysing complex medical data.
Thanks to machine learning, AI learns to identify patterns and abnormalities within medical images,
genetic profiles, or patient records in order to enhance diagnostics. It is most useful when dealing with
vast datasets that are difficult for humans to analyse due to the sheer amount of data. Artificial
intelligence greatly increases the efficiency of analysing datasets and eliminates the risk for human
error, subsequently improving the accuracy of diagnostics and assisting healthcare professionals with
early disease detection.
Furthermore, artificial intelligence can monitor patients when human physicians cannot. It is
possible to distribute AI devices to every patient, but there is a limited number of doctors and neither
of them is able to constantly monitor people. As explained above, artificial intelligence is more than
capable of analysing data, and it can do that non-stop for an unlimited amount of time. This allows
physicians to focus on more pressing matters as long as the AI does not detect anything that requires
their assistance.
A very promising use of artificial intelligence is in predictive analytics. Similarly, to
diagnosing patients, AI analyses vast amounts of healthcare data to generate valuable insights. By
examining, patient records, patient monitoring data, and other sources, it is capable of predicting the
progression of diseases, responses to treatment, and potential adverse events. This predictive capability
helps healthcare professionals make informed and thought-through decisions, subsequently resulting
in improved patient outcomes.
Unfortunately, artificial intelligence is not perfect, and it has its disadvantages. Most
importantly, AI and especially machine learning are best suited to working on existing data. While
predictions are possible, anticipating the distant future precisely is beyond the current capabilities of
AI. Furthermore, artificial intelligence can only act on the data that it is given, so every conclusion that
it comes to is based only on what already happened in the past. However, in healthcare things change
constantly, and each situation is different. AI will always have to be learning and it will always run
into situations for which it is not prepared. Another concern is that artificial intelligence algorithms
have already been shown to inherit biases present in the data that is used to train them. For example, it
has been discovered that algorithms designed to assist judges tended to racial discrimination.
 In conclusion, artificial intelligence shows great promise for revolutionizing healthcare. While
it does have its limitations it is still an unbelievably valuable tool that should be used to assist
healthcare providers. It has the potential to enhance the process of diagnosing patients as well as
patient monitoring, thus improving healthcare in general.

References:
Obermeyer, Z., & Emanuel, E. J. (2016). Predicting the Future - Big Data, Machine Learning,
and Clinical Medicine. The New England journal of medicine, 375(13), 1216–1219.
https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp1606181

Chen, J. H., & Asch, S. M. (2017). Machine Learning and Prediction in Medicine - Beyond
the Peak of Inflated Expectations. The New England journal of medicine, 376(26), 2507–
2509. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp1702071

Char, D. S., Shah, N. H., & Magnus, D. (2018). Implementing Machine Learning in Health
Care - Addressing Ethical Challenges. The New England journal of medicine, 378(11), 981–
983. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp1714229