Artificial intelligence in health care is already here, but where to next?

Artificial intelligence (AI) in health care has arrived, with enormous potential for change in the delivery of care, but experts published in the Medical Journal of Australia today are asking if we are ready. "AI, machine learning, and deep neural network tools can assist medical decision making and management, and have already permeated into at least three different levels: AI-assisted image interpretation; AI-assisted diagnosis; and, AI-assisted prediction and prognostication," wrote the authors, Joseph Sung, the Mok Hing Yiu Professor of Medicine at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Cameron Stewart, Professor of Health, Law and Ethics at the University of Sydney, and Professor Ben Freedman, the Deputy Director of Research Strategy at the Heart Research Institute and the University of Sydney's Charles Perkins Center and Concord Clinical School. "From diagnosing retinopathy to cardiac arrhythmias, from screening for skin cancer to breast cancer, from predicting outcome of stroke to self-management of chronic diseases, AI and machine learning devices can replace many time-consuming, labor-intensive, repetitive and mundane tasks of clinicians and give possible suggestions of management plans," Sung and colleagues wrote. The quality of AI in health care is dependent on the quality of the data on which it is based. "Algorithms are being developed and validated on data generated by health care systems where current practices may already be inequitable," they wrote.