New roles for doctors in the age of AI

Reviewed by Emily Henderson, B.Sc.Sep 19 2020

Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this opinion article the authors Fengyi Zeng, Xiaowen Liang and Zhiyi Chen from The Third Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, Guangzhou, China consider new roles for clinicians in the age of artificial intelligence (AI).

With the rapid developments of digital picture processing, pattern recognition, and intelligent algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) applications are now widely used in medicine. Applications of artificial intelligence in medicine (AIM) include diagnosis generation, therapy selection, healthcare management and disease stratification. AIM focuses on assisting clinicians in disease detection, quantitative measurements, and differential diagnosis which improves diagnostic accuracy and optimizes treatment selection.

However, there is little research on the consideration of clinicians in the age of AI. Concerns have been raised as to whether doctors will eventually be replaced by AI. From this viewpoint, the authors elaborate on the unlikelihood of AI completely replacing doctors and explore how doctors can adapt their roles to assist successful integration of AI into current medical techniques and procedures.