Medical chatbot Med-PaLM 2 from Google, containing elements of artificial intelligence (AI), began to actively test at the Mayo Clinic and other medical institutions in the United States. Meanwhile, the use of AI in medicine today is a global trend that has also affected Russia. Details on how Russian doctors use technologies based on artificial intelligence and what are the prospects for their development can be found in the Izvestia article.
Aspects of application
According to the Webiomed predictive analytics platform, investments in Russian digital healthcare in 2014–2023 amounted to $306.3 million. At the same time, the largest amount of investments – $147.3 million – was attracted in 2021, against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic. The largest share of investments (44%) fell on services for patients. The second place is taken by telemedicine and health insurance (17% each), and the third place is occupied by investments in artificial intelligence (7%).
Today, artificial intelligence in Russian hospitals is mainly used to decipher medical images. As Pavel Litvinov, head of the organizational development department of the Gemotest laboratory, says in an interview with Izvestia, usually each such image (CT, MRI, X-ray, mammography) is described by a doctor. However, depending on the complexity of the case analysis by a specialist takes from 15–30 minutes to several hours.
— AI saves time and sees more patients, because it can analyze several images at once and highlight areas that the doctor should pay special attention to. As a result, it takes the machine no more than a minute to decipher one image, and the accuracy exceeds 90%,” explains Pavel Litvinov.
In addition, artificial intelligence is already helping Russian doctors process medical documents faster, suggesting diagnoses and treatment regimens that comply with approved clinical guidelines. At the same time, AI is actively used in the production of medicines. The algorithm selects drug molecules that are more likely to survive clinical trials and get into circulation faster.
“This is beneficial not only for manufacturers, but also for consumers, since less effort is spent on the creation of drugs, their cost is reduced, and the retail price in pharmacies is reduced,” Pavel Litvinov notes.
back side
According to Fatima Tamayeva, chief physician of the L7 Breast Center, artificial intelligence has been actively used in medicine over the past 15 years. Wherein The main advantages of implementing AI technologies in healthcare are getting rid of routine work for doctors, saving time and the ability to provide care to a larger number of patients.
“For example, there are traditionally not enough specialists who describe x-rays or images obtained with CT or MRI, so there are huge queues for such examinations, and you need to sign up for several weeks, or even months,” explains Pavel Litvinov. “Artificial intelligence solves this problem.
At the same time, as Fatima Tamaeva notes, The main difficulty in using innovative technologies lies in the lack of criteria for assessing the quality and effectiveness of technologies. There are a huge number of manufacturers on the market, but it is only possible to determine which development is really the best in practice.
“Therefore, even now there is a possibility of a software failure, which is why the probability of making an incorrect diagnosis still remains,” says the Izvestia interlocutor.
The specialist highlights another risk of the widespread introduction of AI, which, however, goes far beyond the healthcare sector – this is the fear of job losses and rising unemployment on the part of medical personnel. That is why digital transformation must be preceded by internal process reengineering. It is also necessary to take into account the cultural changes that the process of digital transformation will inevitably cause, Tamaeva believes.
According to Pavel Litvinov, in any case, it is impossible to fully delegate diagnostics to AI technologies due to the risk of unreliability. The fact is that artificial intelligence can make a mistake and make a wrong diagnosis, especially if the model was trained on incomplete data. That’s why in any case, doctors should check the results of the algorithms, which, therefore, may not worry about their jobs.
legal factor
The active introduction of artificial intelligence in medicine has another rather non-obvious side – legal. As a forensic expert in the field of information technology and IT consultant Aleksey Zhurinov says in an interview with Izvestia, determining responsibility for errors related to the use of AI is a difficult task. The fact is that the issues of its application and bringing it under certain legal frameworks have not yet been worked out to the end.
– At the moment, it is not clear who will be legally responsible in case of artificial intelligence errors – AI developers, technology owners or doctors themselveswho made a decision based on data from their digital assistant, the specialist explains.
In turn, Pavel Litvinov notes that in Russia, one of the main problems associated with the use of algorithms based on artificial intelligence in medicine is their potential inability to detect data falsification. This can lead to the spread of misinformation and the risk of misdiagnosis. At the same time, even small errors in the initial data can lead to fundamentally different diagnoses at the output.
“Nevertheless, there are methods and technologies that can help solve this problem, in particular, authentication algorithms, filters and content moderation,” says the specialist. There is one more problem: the use of AI jeopardizes the protection of personal data due to their possible leaks.
According to Pavel Litvinov, legislative regulation of these technologies can protect society from possible threats associated with the use of artificial intelligence in medicine. However, its “side effect” for the development of AI in Russia may be the difficulty in accessing the latest technologies in this area and slowing down their development.
Digital Future
Despite all the controversial points, experts believe that in the future digital technologies based on artificial intelligence will be increasingly used in medicine. According to Fatima Tamaeva, the Russian society is expected to form a new ethics of medicine, the systematic development of digital technologies and the expansion of the use of technical resources.
“Artificial intelligence makes it possible to speed up the process of making diagnoses, increase the availability and quality of medical care, and improve the systematization of medical data,” says the Izvestia interlocutor.
As Pavel Litvinov explains, in the future, they plan to train AI to lead the patient autonomously – to make a diagnosis and prescribe treatment, taking into account symptoms, test results and examinations. In their wildest dreams, developers plan to create systems that will monitor human health around the clock, transmit data to the hospital and thus help provide a personalized approach to diagnosis and treatment. Nevertheless, doctors will still be involved in the process.
“Now digital algorithms are mainly used in Moscow hospitals,” says the specialist. — Over time, AI solutions will become cheaper and will be available to the regions. Artificial intelligence can greatly facilitate the routine work of doctors, but it can never completely replace them.
Fatima Tamaeva concludes that today the introduction of innovative technologies in medicine is opposed by the high cost of equipment, the ethical and legal aspects of the use of AI, as well as the distrust of some patients in innovative technologies. Despite this, market research consulting experts predict that the AI healthcare market will reach $34.5 billion by 2027. Therefore, the development of digital technologies in both global and Russian medicine is only a matter of time.
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