Charting Pathways to AI-Enabled Healthcare

摘要

AI shows promising potential to improve patient health outcomes, and the accelerating pace of technological advancement suggests health AI may be approaching a transformative threshold. Despite this promise, widespread implementation remains elusive. What barriers persist, and how might we chart a viable path forward? This talk examines two critical pathways to realizing AI's potential in healthcare: how can we enable large-scale access to clinical data and how can we evolve AI to earn the trust of medical professionals? The first challenge - lack of access to clinical data - is well-recognized but persistent. Despite recent increases in publicly available healthcare data, we still lack the volume and diversity needed to ensure accuracy across demographic groups and medical conditions. In other AI domains such as text generation, the breakthrough to reliable performance came through massive-scale training datasets. Healthcare requires a similar scale, yet patient privacy rightfully restricts data access. This presentation will explore methods for generating synthetic patient records that maintain privacy while providing the necessary training scale. The second pathway involves evolving AI to build trust within the clinical community. Medical AI must offer transparency in its decision-making processes. For instance, when answering whether ''Alice takes blood thinners'', an AI system must provide supporting evidence rather than a simple yes/no response. Two approaches will be presented that address this need: fact-verification systems for clinical claims in structured data and semantic highlighting for unstructured text. For predictive scenarios such as ''Will Alice need ventilator support in the next 48 hours?'', I will demonstrate how predictions coupled with counterfactual explanations enhance clinical trust. In addition, AI can earn provider trust by solving problems clinicians lack time to address, such as translating radiology reports into patient-friendly explanations. I will showcase methodologies that effectively bridge this communication gap. Clearing these pathways is essential to equip healthcare providers with AI tools that enable more accurate, efficient decision-making. Despite the challenges, there are compelling reasons for optimism that these barriers can be overcome, bringing us closer to truly AI-enabled healthcare.