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Give and take

Some of the liveliest material, including the question and answer above, emerged during a brief Q&A period following the prepared presentations.

To Parikhs point on machine learnings limitations in clinical settings, Chase added an illustrative anecdote.

A couple of medical students told me last week that when the sepsis alert goes off in the electronic health record, basically everybody ignores it because they dont believe it, Chase said. Its black box and was delivered within the electronic health record. Nobodys tested it on sensitivity and specificity.

So [you should] hit the pause button and then decide whether or not [an algorithms] data point applies to your patient.

Demise of the doctors?

Perhaps inevitably, the subject of AIs potential for replacing physicians came up during the Q&A.

Theres no question that imaging-based specialtiesradiology, pathology, dermatologyhave been notably successful using machine learning, Chase responded. But the goal should be better care by way of a happy outcome for both AI and human image interpreters.

I think the next generation of radiologists will be operating at a higher level, Chase explained. Theyll be overseeing the cases that are being referred to them by the machine and making sure that you dont over-biopsy a patient because of a false positive.

And I think that actually will make the profession to some extent more interesting. Youre not going to be looking at film after film that ends up being negative.

Machine, meet patient

Parikh urged attendees to imagine a clinical decision-making scenario from the patients point of view.

If you were hearing that a machine rather than a human was going to be diagnosing your lung cancer would you be interested in that? I would imagine that a lot of patients wouldnt be, Parikh said. Theres still a huge demand for a human element to how we practice medicine. That element is never going to be replaced by machines.

Too often, weve been thinking about these things as adversarialhuman versus machinewhen the real purpose of a machine is to collaborate with a human.

AMA session summary with video here. Standalone video posted to YouTube here.

More:
AI experts to med students: Don't compete with the machine. Collaborate with it - AI in Healthcare