[Photograph by Park Sae-jin ]
There was no clear answer to questions about when AI will be accurate and reliable enough to replace doctors. Lily Peng, the product manager of Google's AI research group also gave no prediction, saying only that doctors assisted by AI would "soon" have a better sense of awareness of what's happening to patients.
"I think medicine is too complex for AI to replace doctors, but I do think that AI can produce some really, really good tools," Peng, who is also a doctor of medicine, said at a Google forum in Seoul. "A combination of an AI tool plus a doctor would get you a better result."
Sometimes, doctors find grey areas in data they receive from machines, making them hard to understand what's really going on with their patients, Peng said, adding AI assists doctors like self-driving cars which help drivers to focus more on the road ahead.
Google is among many companies pushing the limits of developing healthcare AI to assist doctors battling against diseases such as cancer and diabetes. Google Brain, a deep learning AI research team, focuses on developing assistive AI technologies that will enable doctors to take better care of patients.
Google's healthcare AI detects cancers and symptoms of diabetic retinopathy, a blinding eye disease found in diabetes patients. Sometimes, it can analyze images and detect signs of diseases better than human specialists. Selected hospitals have adopted IBM's healthcare AI Watson, which diagnoses diseases and suggests personalized treatment.
"With AI, we will be able to pick out the right information that would make big differences to our patients," Peng said, pointing to a situation in which doctors are surrounded by distractions such as beeping noises and charts with tons of information. She said AI can filter out meaningless data.
The healthcare AI market is expected to grow from $2.1 billion in 2018 to $36.1 billion by 2025, according to Markets and Markets, a global market research company.
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com
