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Donggyun Park

Professor Frank

WRIT 1E

5 December 2018

Research Argument

Have you watched any movies in which AI robots diagnose diseases, lead surgeries

and cure human bodies in marvelous ways that we could not even imagine few decades ago?

This seems to come true in the visible future. Artificial Intelligence is one of the hottest

topics in numerous research areas these days. As a scientific method, using AI is being

adopted in medical diagnosis. With this unprecedented change happening, people have

started asking ‘Can AI replace doctors?’ and many discussions on this topic are on-going.

Every person would agree that AI will significantly affect the entire conventional medical

systems, so it must be debated by people including experts from various fields. Typically, one

side insists that the AI will completely replace doctors and the other side says AI cannot or

should not replace doctors. Here, most people consider AI for medical purposes as a

counterpart of human doctors and this tendency seems to lead the discussions to issues related

with laws, ethics and people’s awareness rather than scientific proofs. In this argument, by

employing a different perspective on this topic, I hope this proposal will give us a better or

more meaningful direction to the solution that both sides would agree.

First, we will cover the prospect of the future healthcare system in order to have a

sense for how the current healthcare system is going to be changed. So far many researchers

have studied and anticipated the change of healthcare system utilizing AI. In the close future

it is possible to connect most of the medical datasets from all over the world through cloud-
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based technologies and use them to boost diverse learning processes of AI1. There are already

many cases that have proved this network’s precision on many papers. Also, the historical

facts and the blueprints of the future medical diagnosis system are provided with concrete

figures. We can easily imagine how it will look, but many people have a skeptical view

toward this radical application. By people who disagree with the application of AI for the

medical purpose, it is said that AI is not as accurate as doctors2. From this reference, some of

them say ‘doctors’ gut feelings’ play an important role on medical diagnosis since human

doctors have abilities to take into account the overall information. However, so-called

Doctors’ gut feelings are based on what the doctors have learned and experiences from many

cases of their patients or clinical experiments, which does not imply that they are intuitively

judged. This means if AI gets trained with proper data sets (software) for enough time and

equips medical instruments (hardware) to perceive patients’ external conditions, it will also

be able to find such feeling-based symptoms from the patients. Meanwhile, they claim that

there are no well-established regulations or laws to judge when misdiagnosis happen. Also,

people’s awareness will not be able to follow the speed of changes in lots of medical

situations. Obviously these are very sensitive issues which seem uncompromisable.

On the other hand, the benefits of using AI can be easily found from a number of

articles or experiments3. The authors collected the data from various medical methods and

data sources(Magnetic Resonance Image, Computed Tomography, Electrocardiography, etc.).

1
Fei Jiang et al, “Artificial intelligence in healthcare: past, present and future | Stroke and Vascular Neurology”.

https://svn.bmj.com/content/2/4/230

2
Jeff Lagasse, “AI can’t replace doctor’s gut instincts, MIT study says, Healthcare Finance News”,

https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/artificial-intelligence-cant-replace-doctors-gut-instincts-mit-study-says

3
Mihalj Bakator and Dragica Radosav, “Deep Learning and Medical Diagnosis: A Review of Literature”, Technical Faculty

“Mihajlo Pupin” in Zrenjanin, University of Novi Sad, 17 August 2018

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Based on statistical evidences, they concluded that the even wider use of deep learning is

going to be applied. Also, it can be easily found that many Deep Learning applications are

getting considerably improved and some of them are already commercialized. There is a

variety of examples demonstrating specific details. One example is Magnetic Resonance

Image(MRI) optimization using Deep Learning techniques4. The fact we really need to be

aware of is that this techniques help doctors find symptoms that might be invisible to human

eyes while they decrease doctors’ simple repetitive labor. The process is successfully

conducted within even shorter time. This development is improving the accuracy of

diagnostic radiology significantly.

However, even though we have been facing a flood of scientifically useful advances, as

the opposite argument insists, there is no perfect answer including related laws or ethical

standards dealing with exceptional cases including misdiagnosis derived from using AI on the

medical fields. For example, if AI ends up showing a critical fault that might results in a

patient’s death, who should be accused of misdiagnosis between the engineers and the

doctors caring for the patient? Therefore, AI replacing doctors completely would not be

possible unless we compromise with certain ethical issues. As an alternative, I propose that

we need to interpret the AI as one of many supportive ‘tools’ controlled by engineers and

doctors. Here are some good examples. Chatbots, analyzing pathology and diagnosing rare

diseases using facial recognition are surely not replacing doctors by themselves

independently but help doctors make a decision or find symptoms that are barely detected by

doctors’ eyes5.

4
Dongwook Lee et al, “Deep Residual Learning for Accelerated MRI using Magnitude and Phase Networks”

5
Kumba Sennaar, “Machine Learning for Medical Diagnostic – 4 Current Applications”,
https://www.techemergence.com/machine-learning-medical-diagnostics-4-current-applications/
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So far, we have gone through the pros and cons about the application of AI for

medical purpose. The technical disagreement of AI and doctors is going to be made up as

time flows. Seemingly the untouchable points are the few ethical issues and the related laws

as medical diagnosis can survive patients or it can result in medical disasters at the same time.

To get rid of these risks, the different view is proposed. We will need to utilize the AI to

handle overwhelming bio-data more efficiently, but should not burden all the responsibility

on AI because AI itself was created by human beings. As a tool, it will make doctors free

from repetitive works and interpreting vague information by using big-data analysis.

Regarding to this perspective, an incumbent physician has claimed a similar way that I want

to share6. In this essay, the physician has many people who knock his office door other than

his patients and they are a lot of software and hardware engineers who have been conducting

researches on AI at the San Francisco Bay Area (which is known as a place full of

entrepreneurs for engineering). After having experienced a number of cases of diagnoses,

prescriptions, adjusting and orders of medical tests, he says, “It could let me get to know my

patients better, learn how a disease uniquely affects them, and give me time to coach them

toward a better outcome.”

As we have looked over the advantages of utilizing AI, it will release doctors from the

most of repetitive and inaccurate medical measurements and labors as they keep being

mentioned from the beginning. There are tons of proved evidences and commercialized

applications positively supporting this argument. However, at the same time we should be

prepared to perceive radically changing phases of the reality of the medical fields and become

aware of how to properly adapt ourselves to the new environment. It is not necessary to be

fully aware of how AI algorithms are stacked up all together, but by roughly understanding

6 Rahul Parikh, “AI can’t replace doctors. But it can make them better”, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612277/ai-
cant-replace-doctors-but-it-can-make-them-better/
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how AI devices work with doctors, definitely we will feel more comfortable and supported

by AI both physically and mentally. In this sense, we will be on the top of AI.