Doctors have an extremely hard time dealing with complex disorders or even diagnosing them. People go years without a proper diagnosis.
I would love for doctors to just take all the information during first visit and then use some kind of search engine/AI that would go and analyze current literature, new research and suggest things to rule out in a cost effective manner while ruling out things that would need immediate diagnosis/treatment such as cancers.
Patients also need to be tracked if they agree to it, especially if they have a serious disabling condition. Their sleeping habits, diet and everything they do needs to reviewed in detail but just isn't done. Most of these things are self reported and that can be problematic.
Slightly related but there's a website somewhere that you can upload your DNA sequence (in a .txt file!) to and it shows you relevant scientific literature. About 50% of those articles for me told me that I was probably going to develop male pattern baldness in my thirties/forties.
Basically, pharmaceutical marketing is causing doctors to be really misinformed and a lot of doctors lack knowledge about updates from the FDA on certain drugs. They often prescribe medication which are more dangerous than others.
I am thinking about creating my own little tool to research drugs before taking them.
It also utilizes DrugBank: https://DrugBank.com
There are a few exceptions like BRCA where the risk from certain genotypes is high enough to justify aggressive preventative care.
There have been clinical decision support systems around for years which can recommend a diagnosis given complete and accurate clinical data. The real problem is gathering that data, and putting it in a form that the algorithm can use. An AI algorithm can't really gather a detailed patient history or make subjective observations about the patient's state. Those are steps which can't really be automated without strong AGI. In theory a doctor could do all the necessary data entry but in practice it would usually be a waste of time and no one wants to pay for it.
Chat bots can handle data collection, “subjective” patient state can be collected through image recognition and tone analysis. Not sure you need AGI to accomplish either of these tasks.
I keep hearing this whining about overwork, and yet when the subject of residency quota set by the AMA comes up or delegating duties to nurses with almost the same amount of schooling suddenly you can hear crickets in the room.
> In fact, I believe the way most doctor's appointments work is that the doctor gets a list of symptoms, then matches it against a checklist of what they were taught / experience to form a diagnosis. Very similar to an AI algorithm. Of course this isn't as easy as it seems, you can't just Google the symptoms yourself.
Yes you can, and should. Remember half doctors out there are below average...
Doctors have bias. Doctors sometimes get apathetic. Not because they have bad intentions, in fact I bet most doctors really care and really try. But because they're overworked, and they have to care for many patients who they don't personally know, and some of whom get very sick. And because they're only human.
In fact, I believe the way most doctor's appointments work is that the doctor gets a list of symptoms, then matches it against a checklist of what they were taught / experience to form a diagnosis. Very similar to an AI algorithm. Of course this isn't as easy as it seems, you can't just Google the symptoms yourself. Doctors' knowledge and experience is very deep, and takes many years to develop. But still, it's not something an AI couldn't eventually automate.
Right now I would be skeptical of an AI doctor, just because I don't think current AI has that capability. But seriously, if ML gets better I would trust it better than any real doctor.