Focus Rheums| ACR Convergence 2024 Previews

An official publication of the ACR and the ARP serving rheumatologists and rheumatology professionals

Ethics Forum: The Current Landscape of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine

Jeanne Gosselin, MD  |  Issue: May 2024  |  

In rheumatology, predictive models may enable the earlier diagnosis of our diseases and allow for treatment regimens to be tailored to individual patients. LLMs have the potential to discover new biomarkers of disease through the digestion of massive clinically tuned datasets and to tame our EHRs to improve our workflow as physicians.

As someone once said (Voltaire, Churchill and/or Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben, according to my AI-enabled search engine), “with great power comes great responsibility.” Medical researchers and physicians will assume a critical role in evaluating AI. We need to speak the language and be equipped with tools to evaluate the validity, reliability and applicability of ML algorithms and foundation models. Gone will be the days of P values and confidence intervals. The medical community will not be able to rely solely on government oversight or self-regulation by industry for the appropriate and ethical development and application of AI in medicine. Physicians must retain a voice in the planning and implementation of new technology.

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Finally, we will be tasked with not only educating ourselves and each other, but with paving the way for the next generation of researchers and physicians to advance the field, while maintaining a patient-centered, ethically sound approach.

Jeanne Gosselin, MD, is an assistant professor and the associate director of the rheumatology fellowship program at The Robert Larner, M.D., College of Medicine at the University of Vermont Medical Center, Burlington.

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Editor’s note: If you have a comment for the author or a case you’d like to see in Ethics Forum, email us at [email protected].

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