How Will AI Impact Healthcare? The Good, Bad and the Ugly

With the start of summer begins summer reading, reading anything interesting?

I would love to hear from you, reply to this email with your book recommendations! It can be anything from Fantasy to Non-Fiction I would love to add to my list 😀

I recently finished reading Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again this book had some interesting insights on how AI can impact the world of healthcare in the future. The author includes personal stories, as well as, stories from others on how at times the healthcare system failed to take into account his medical history and misdiagnosed patients. He highlights these stories to show how if AI was present in these cases it might have provided important information to help clinicians accurately diagnose.

He highlights in the future that some medical professions that are focused on the clinician identifying patterns (e.g., radiology) are ripe for AI to be integrated. In the book, he highlights the importance of using AI as a way to enhance diagnostics instead of the notion that clinicians will be replaced. The book highlights a quote from Michael Recht and Nick Bryan: “We believe that machine learning and AI will enhance both the value and the professional satisfaction of radiologists by allowing us to spend more time performing functions that add value and influence patient care and less time doing rote asks that we neither enjoy nor perform as well as machines“.

I also read an amazing book called Unmasking AI. In this book, Dr. Buolamwini begins the book with her experience with a concept she calls the “coded gaze”. When she was writing code for facial analysis software she installed software so that she could track the movement of her face, however, the effort failed and she was only able to continue with her project when she donned a white mask. This was because the dataset used to build the software was not trained on a broad range of skin tones and could not recognize her darker skin tone.

Throughout the book, Dr. Buolamwini highlights how these biased datasets can lead to biased algorithms which can create life-or-death situations for marginalized groups, everything from self-driving cars not recognizing people with darker skin tones to algorithms rejecting resumes from female names for job applications at tech companies.

You can read my deep-dive review of these two books here

Additional Resources

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