Bots and docs

Artificial intelligence is sparking a healthcare revolution that will create jobs, cost jobs, free clinicians from repetitive tasks and eventually may lead to robot surgeons, a leading expert in the field says.

It will turbocharge diagnosis of rare diseases and even sound the alert before diseases appear as people get personal healthcare computer assistants and even “digital twins”. 

The forecast comes in the wake of a major medical journal article reporting a team of healthcare professionals – assessing online responses – judged a chatbot’s responses to patients’ questions as better than those from doctors, not only for a diagnosis but for empathy with the patient. The notion of a better bedside manner “from a bot than a doc” raises images of robot surgeons wielding scalpels, a scenario Johan Verjans says may happen one day. “If a human can do it, a robot could do it eventually,” he says. “Almost anything that can be done by humans can be done by computers. Sooner or later.”

Read the full story in The Sunday Mail here.