preferred the cloth mother, even
when only the wire mother gave them
milk.) AI driven care was a sorry version
of the real thing.”
Volume 4 | Issue 1 | January-March 2019
15
Pratik Pawar is a science writer based
in Mumbai. He has a Master’s degree in
Biotechnology and currently works as a
freelancer writing science-centric pieces
with a focus on neuroscience.
Employing AI to most healthcare
activities might also have a negative
Artificial intelligence is going to be
pervasive across the spectrum of
healthcare. From routine lab tests
to offering a clinical decision, AI
algorithms will play a major role in the
future of healthcare. As deep learning
algorithms get stronger and as the
workings of the black box are revealed,
AI technology will make further strides
in healthcare. But advancements in
AI-based healthcare doesn’t mean
the downfall of human doctors.
Healthcare is a highly emotional and
human-centric field and the “human
touch” will always play a pivotal role
in the delivery of healthcare. Humans,
even highly skilled doctors are fallible
beings with inherent limitations and
artificial intelligence will not sideline
these practitioners but augment their
abilities, in making an objectively better
yet humane decision.
As demonstrated by several research
groups, deep learning algorithms have
achieved human-level accuracy and
then some more. It can look for patterns
which are invisible to the human eye.
Thus, sooner or later, displacing and
relegating doctors from their positions,
at least in certain areas of healthcare.
This can lead to massive burnouts in
doctors as their roles shift drastically and
may even lead to gradual attrition of
their skills. But there’s more to care than
just interpreting blood reports and
imaging data of a patient, it has much
more to do about understanding the
needs of patients, their mental state,
etc. The secret of healthcare is not
in reading out objective reports, but
in the assurance and the warmth, a
doctor’s cadence can provide. “Caring
is expressed in listening, in the time-
honored ritual of the skilled bedside
exam - reading the body - in touching
and looking at where it hurts and
ultimately in localizing the disease
for patients not on a screen, not on an
image, not on a biopsy report, but on
their bodies.”, writes Abraham Verghese,
an author and a physician at Stanford.
effect on how knowledge is generated.
Most medical knowledge generated in
the past has been curiosity driven. AI
systems can tell us whether the lesion
is a benign mole or a tumor, but it can’t
provide answers to why the tumor has a
corrugated surface or white patches etc.
HUMAN EXPERIENCE IN AN AI
ENVIRONMENT
The issues mentioned above are all
pertaining to the AI system and its
functioning, but there are vital concerns
about AI’s effect on people involved in
care. Several studies have shown that
patients prefer AI chatbots and virtual
nurses over humans when learning
about their diagnosis as they can proceed
to learn at their own pace without the
embarrassment of not keeping up with
the doctor’s speed. Patients are also more
open to conversation with a computer
than a human being, part of the reason
being the diminished shame and fear
associated with being vulnerable. But
Allison Pugh, a Professor of Sociology
at the University of Virginia and a
writer for the New Yorker, thinks that
virtual nurses and AI bots offer nothing
more than the thinnest veil of care. She
writes, “[...] automating or using AI to
deliver care would be the same as relying
on a “cloth monkey”—a reference to a
cruel experiment, carried out in 1959,
in which infant monkeys were given a
choice between two surrogate mothers,
one made from welded wire, the
other from terry cloth. (The infants
on how it works. Recently though
there have been several predictions to
understand how deep learning works,
the information bottleneck theory
being a prominent one, but the debate
is far from settled.
Microsoft partnered with
Apollo hospitals to use
AI for early detection
of cardiovascular
diseases. Healthi, a
Bengaluru based start-
up is deploying machine
learning to deliver
personalized health
plans. Another Bengaluru
based startup, Niramai
is using AI for pain-free
breast cancer screening.