The medical industry is one of the toughest for patients to navigate, especially if you’re dealing with a situation that requires a specialty doctor, as their schedules can often be grueling to work through. But what if an AI doctor could help make the diagnosis of patients easier and make the doctor’s job a little less difficult?
Bringing AI into the doctor’s office could help alleviate some of the stressors that doctors and patients have to deal with. And this is something that IBM has been working towards for quite a while now with its Watson computer system. Despite being around for 10-plus years, though, Watson hasn’t really progressed too far.
With the advent of large-language models like ChatGPT, the possibility of revolutionizing the medical industry and actually creating reliable AI doctors is more likely than ever, especially with Google DeepMind working towards it, too. In fact, the team at DeepMind has proposed a new AI model they’re calling AMIE or Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer.
According to a new paper that was recently pushed to the preprint server arXiv, AMIE should be able to take in the information from patients and then provide clear explanations of where their medical conditions currently are.
AMIE isn’t designed to replace doctors, though. Google’s AI doctor system is merely meant to act as an assistant for the doctor for wellness visits and consultations. Obviously, the idea of talking with an AI doctor might scare some folks.
After all, many of us already share a mutual hatred for the automated systems that many companies use on their call lines. But, with something like AMIE, Google hopes that it can make the lives of doctors easier and also improve the quality of visits that the patients receive. If the doctor doesn’t have to do everything, like explain medical conditions and things, then it opens more room for a personal approach when it comes to other parts of the journey.
Of course, it remains to be seen just how well these AI systems actually work in practice. An AI doctor is fine and dandy in theory, but the true test will be in how it approaches people in everyday situations, as humans can be quite unpredictable in how they respond to things.
