AI's potential use in medicine vast

Artificial intelligence can be harnessed to boost the efficiency of healthcare services and hospital management, devise tailored treatment plans and help address the shortage of doctors, a senior hospital manager said on Thursday.

Yan Hua, an ophthalmologist who is also Party chief of Tianjin Medical University, said that a wide range of AI tools such as speech recognition, computer vision, data collection and analysis can be deployed to empower the medical sector.

"AI can improve the efficiency of diagnosis and treatment and increase safety and precision in patient care," he said during a Vision China event organized by China Daily in Tianjin. "It can also prescribe personalized medicine based on the particular conditions and genomic information of patients to improve treatment outcomes."

Yan said that AI can also play a positive role in enhancing hospital management and alleviating the lack of doctors. It can also help patch the healthcare insurance net in less-developed regions.

"For instance, grassroots eye doctors might not be capable of detecting diabetic retinopathy accurately and might have no idea how to deliver treatment.

But if communities are equipped with an AI device to help them screen for the condition, those showing signs of the disease can be diagnosed and transferred to better hospitals where they can be treated," he said.

Yan said that the accuracy rate of AI-powered diagnosis is nearly on par with that of experienced doctors, but AI greatly shortens the time it takes to generate a correct diagnosis.

"Also, for patients with very complicated eye diseases, AI can be used to help design and execute a surgery," he added.

Yan said that for patients with severe eye trauma and who have lost the perception of light, the question of whether a vitrectomy — surgery to remove the eye's vitreous humor, the tissue behind the lens of the eye, and replace it with another solution — would yield the desired results is difficult for even top doctors to determine.

"We have therefore developed and upgraded an AI model that is fed the condition of patients before surgery, such as whether the retina is detached or the vision is impaired," he said.

"As a result of continuous training and testing, the system can generate an accurate prediction of the post-surgery level of vision."

Yan Hua said that AI's spread into the healthcare sector has begun but remains at an early stage.

"Although AI has many advantages, doctors cannot be replaced entirely because AI needs to learn and train," he said.

"As the medical field advances, doctors are still needed to continue feeding fresh data to the AI for it to process."

A potential caveat, he said, is how to determine legal responsibilities when an incorrect diagnosis is given, or a misuse of technologies occurs.

"The protection of patient-doctor privacy and data security are bound to be essential tasks," he said.

Yan added that there is no standard pricing mechanism for medical services involving AI so far, which could prevent hospitals from purchasing and deploying AI equipment.