AI revolutionizing healthcare

This article was exclusively written for The European Sting by Ms. Shanzay Naveed, a 3rd year MBBS student at Allama Iqbal Medical College, Pakistan. She is affiliated with the International Federation of Medical Students Associations (IFMSA), cordial partner of The Sting. The opinions expressed in this piece belong strictly to the writer and do not necessarily reflect IFMSA’s view on the topic, nor The European Sting’s one.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has already changed much of the world as we know it – from automating systems to improving the decisions we make and the ways we go about making them. Yet, perhaps the most impactful ways AI is changing our world are within the field of health care, where it’s being used to diagnose, create personalized treatment plans, and even predict patient survival rates. 

Since the invention of AI in 1955, its applications have grown in a quickly changing digital ecosystem where public expectations are rising and fuelled by social media, industrial leaders, and medical practitioners. Artificial intelligence has had fixed various issues in education during the last decade, including language processing, reasoning, planning, and cognitive modelling. At its annual conference in 2018, the American Medical Association (AMA) adopted its first policy on augmented intelligence. It supported studies that highlighted how AI should be undertaken in medical education. 

AI can provide knowledge to physicians as clinical issues come up, saving time spent reviewing what they already know or skimming stuff that isn’t relevant to their practices. AI can influence the student learning process in three ways: direct teaching (imparting knowledge to the student while playing the role of a teacher), support teaching (playing a supporting role and collaborating with students as they learn), and empowering the learner (multiple students can collaborate to solve a complex problem upon feedback provided by the teacher). The subthemes of the use of AI include chatbots, intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), virtual patients, gamification, and adaptive learning systems.

Some of the advantages that have made the integration of AI in medical education an undeniable reality include the expansion of the use of virtual reality (VR), can perform formative ands summative assessment processes with less time and cost, enhance students’ diagnostic proficiency, increases transparency and allows for a meaningful comparison of the effectiveness of medical education across various countries, allows for distance learning and makes medical education more accessible in areas with limited resources and remote locations and facilitate many active learning strategies, such as problem-based, case-based, small-group, and large-group learning.

Challenges can be essential infrastructure, ethical issues, complex interdisciplinary collaborations, technical malfunction and lack of evaluation method for educational strategies. AI can enhance the value of the non-analytical humanistic aspects of medicine. From a plethora of possibilities, a healthcare professional has to be abstract and make sense of the information while making a medical judgment in an age where medical knowledge is growing exponentially. 

While the use of AI in training programs is imperative, educators must strike a balance in how they integrate its use into their teachings to avoid an overreliance on this new technology at the expense of innate clinical skills. AI has made great strides in clinical practice, yet it is not without its shortcomings and biases. The knowledge of a physician is still needed to address these limitations, but this knowledge is unlikely to be gained if the totality of a trainee’s education contains elements of incorporated AI.

References:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10352669

https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(19)30716-8/fulltext

https://www.cureus.com/articles/217832-future-implications-of-artificial-intelligence-in-medical-education#!

About the author

Shanzay Naveed, a 3rd year MBBS student at Allama Iqbal Medical College, is an affiliated member and Assistant Director of PUBSSD at IFMSA. Her 2 articles have already been published on European Sting, 6 stories on TWS Publications and an article & a story on Brewing Minds. She is in organizing team of AIMC Scientific Conference 2022. She is Volunteer Resource Secretary at VFHAT and Assistant Director of Education and Networking Team of AJRS. She has presented her research on SCICON 2022. She has attended VCON’23 and NGA’23. Her contact information is shanzaywarriach@gmail.com