In a guest article for The Guardian, released on 26 June, our director Prof Mihaela van der Schaar outlines how artificial intelligence could transform the way medical professionals treat diseases and save lives.
In said article, Prof van der Schaar describes how AI can offer solutions to the effective and affordable healthcare conundrum, but also about its limitations:
“AI tends not to work well in the real world. Complexity proves an obstacle. So far, AI technologies have had little impact on the messy, inherently human world of medicine. But what if AI tools were designed specifically for real-world medicine – with all its organisational, scientific, and economic complexity?“
Prof van der Schaar calls this a “reality-centric” approach to AI. She explains how, working in close collaboration with clinicians and hospital, advanced AI tools can foster personalised medicine, earlier diagnosis, prevention, and more effective individualised treatment.
Further to that, she mentions additional use cases, such as the revolutionising of clinical trials through analysing existing trial data for more individualised treatment effect evaluation. “Digital twins” could offer the opportunity for preliminary trials before expensive trials with real people. Advances in synthetic data, in addition, help deal with patient privacy and data scarcity.
In the end, it is is all about giving clinicians the tools they need to provide the best possible treatment for patients:
“This is part of what I call the human AI empowerment agenda – using AI to empower humans, not to replace them. The aim should not be to construct autonomous agents that can mimic and supplant humans, but to develop machine learning that allows humans to improve their cognitive and introspective abilities, enabling them to become better learners and decision-makers.“
Read the full article here.
