Once in a generation, century, or millennia, medical advances give cause for genuine celebration. Over the past century, the interrelated fields of medicine and life sciences have been disrupted by advances with profound, immediate, and future implications for human health and longevity. The most recent revolutionary advances in quantum computing and artificial intelligence offer an exponential acceleration and amplification of breathtaking progress against disease, disability, and aging.
The healthcare industry is complex, competitive, contradictory, and prioritizes profitability and safety. Compassion, cost-effectiveness, equitable access, and other ethical concerns are not at the forefront.
Although highly regulated, it is still remarkably dysfunctional, inefficient, and resistant to effective oversight and correction. For generations, the healthcare marketplace has embraced the population-based approach that considers what is best for the average person as the standard of care for all. This approach gave the public the false impression that equality of care was synonymous with quality of care. It has taken decades for the healthcare field to adopt the philosophy that each person is a unique individual who deserves personalized, precision, proactive, preventive, and participatory care.
Artificial intelligence offers the dramatic opportunity to rapidly accelerate personalized precision care. With the advent of electronic health records, the care and outcomes data of hundreds of millions of people have become accessible to data mining software. De-identifiable data, with sophisticated protective mechanisms to prevent individual privacy violations, can be effectively mined for advanced research purposes.
As just one example, over 80 million computerized tomography (CT) scans are performed yearly in the U.S., providing detailed imaging of a specific body part. AI has allowed researchers to tap into the mountain of data accumulated from “discarded” areas that were not of immediate concern. This concept of identifying emerging health problems, such as the loss of muscle mass (sarcopenia) or bone mineral density (osteopenia), is called opportunistic imaging. AI opens every area of the life sciences to explosive transformation, with immediate practical clinical impact resulting in improved outcomes, enhanced safety, and guidance directed to cost-effective care.
Over the last several years, more frequent breakthroughs have been announced via science fiction-worthy headlines. The cure of hemophilia, sickle cell anemia, and other genetic diseases with a single injection of gene editing CRISPR technology. Advances in cancer research mean that certain strains go from untreatable fatality to curable with a series of pills. Histotripsy using painless ultrasound generated microscopic bubbles to destroy tumors without surgery or radiation. The development of biological agents such as monoclonal antibodies and immunotherapy has revolutionized the care of inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, ulcerative colitis, and Crohn’s Disease. The prospects have never looked brighter for the hundreds of millions of individuals with diverse chronic diseases.
While advanced technological and scientific breakthroughs are the ultimate goal in medical research, there are also crucial, overlooked opportunities that are ready to be tackled.
The average doctor is estimated to be at least 15 years behind in the knowledge needed to practice state-of-the-art medicine. The frequency of misdiagnosis and medical error affects 20% of the population. This staggering figure has been an open secret for decades and has historically resisted every attempt to reduce it. Research studies have consistently shown remarkable improvements in accuracy if artificial intelligence is applied to even the most basic of healthcare services, such as interpreting imaging studies, visualizing skin lesions, or taking a medical history and naming the diagnostic possibilities. Not only is artificial intelligence more accurate than experienced physicians, but it is also faster, available at a fraction of the cost, and free of fatigue.
By reducing medical errors, artificial intelligence will save hundreds of thousands of lives every year in the U.S. If we do not take advantage of artificial intelligence to harvest this low-hanging fruit, it will bring new clarity to Albert Einstein’s wry aphorism: “Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.”
