Artificial Intelligence in Health and Medicine

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a burgeoning area within the field of health and medicine, bringing substantial value to health research and diagnosis of patients.

AI has been used extensively in medical diagnostics for at least a decade, with huge power in its ability to process complex patient records to suggest diagnoses to their physician based on new symptoms, or to identify patterns of disease for research across many patients with the same conditions. The development of image recognition algorithms has enabled rapid diagnostics from medical scans and photographs, used widely in identification of potential malignancy ahead of human review.

However, there are also serious concerns regarding the application of AI in health research, such as the development of generative AI models frequently requires ingestion of patient data into the model, bringing privacy considerations. The potential for removal of the doctor from much of medical interaction brings concern for the automation of the doctor-patient relationship, without genuine understanding of the patient as a whole human or wider knowledge of their symptoms.

I will discuss the current developments of AI in health and medicine, their recent history, in addition to the benefits of these approaches and some concerns they may raise.

Lucy Burkitt-Gray MA (Cantab) PhD GradStat is Lead Data Analyst for UK Biobank, a massive-scale health research project and charity based in Stockport, Manchester. Lucy moved to UK Biobank in 2019, and has since worked to deliver to the public large new datasets such as whole exome and whole genome sequencing of UK Biobank's 500,000 participants. Lucy is passionate about widening access to highly valuable research cohorts, and as such is proud to be part of the transformation of the UK Biobank resource onto their cloud-based Research Analysis Platform. Lucy has a PhD in Computational Infection Biology from University College Dublin, and an MA in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge. Lucy is a Graduate Statistician of the Royal Statistical Society.