If the time comes for life-and-death decisions for loved ones or ourselves, our doctors may have a have a powerful partner in thinking through the issues: artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a revolutionary technology that is expanding into many of our daily encounters with business, education, government and even recreation. And it has established more than just a foothold in healthcare.
But with its vast potential for improving medical diagnostics and treatment, we must proceed cautiously, Dr. Susannah Rose told The Rotary Club of McMinnville at its weekly luncheon Thursday at First Presbyterian Church. Rose is a bioethicist with faculty and administrative positions at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) and Vanderbilt University’s College of Medicine.
“Where (AI) is really useful,” she noted, is in the medical specialties of pathology and radiology, disciplines that depend on the recognition of biological abnormities in human tissues and organs.
After completing their basic medical education, doctors spend years in additional training to examine the minute, subtle details in images or laboratory analyses to find anomalies that cause, or may cause, disease. Machine learning and computers have the advantage of being able to work continuously around the clock without fatigue or distraction, and to compare real-life specimens with millions of relevant cases.
AI also has the power to compare the outcomes of thousands of medical cases with similar characteristics after the patient has received various alternative treatments. The question of what works best may be answered, at least statistically, in a few microseconds.
But with all its power and promise, the medical community is not ready to jump into AI without serious and critical scrutiny, Rose emphasized in her Rotary presentation.
“We need to think about these things carefully,” while providing maximum “transparency” to all interests, not the least of which are the patients, their families and caregivers.
Wherever it is applied, AI has the capacity to learn from its interactions with the real world. In other words, it can have the virtue of continual improvement, learning from its mistakes as well as its successes, the Rotary speaker observed.
Among other high-ranking appointments, Rose is executive director of VUMC’s AI Discovery & Vigilance to Accelerate Innovation & Clinical Excellence (ADVANCE) Center. A member of the Core Faculty in the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society, she is also associate professor in VU’s departments of Biomedical Ethics and Health Policy.
In an interview recorded at McMinnville Public Radio 91.3-WCPI, she explained that part of her work involves the vetting of AI and other emerging technologies to assure they are safe and reliable before they are integrated into healthcare systems and processes.
At the Rotary luncheon she revealed that she and her team have been awarded a $7.3 million federal grant to continue their work on AI safety.
After her undergraduate education in psychology and philosophy at Furman University, Rose earned the Master of Science in Social Work at Columbia University and the MA and PhD in health policy and ethics at Harvard.
It was a big week for AI locally with Rose’s visit at McMinnville Rotary and globally when the 2024 Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry honored foundational work in that field and its practical applications in protein configurations, a key to possibly treating genetic defects and diseases.
The half-hour conversation with the Vanderbilt bioethicist will air on 91.3 FM Tuesday at 5 p.m. and again Saturday at 9:30 a.m.
