Artificial intelligence (AI) is used in more and more applications, including medicine. Hospitals around the country, including in Florida, are using AI in many diagnostic tools. But while the expectation is that AI can speed up diagnosis and delivery of care, a number of studies have recently demonstrated that AI can in fact worsen bias, miss serious illness, and deny care to those in need. If your doctor or medical system used AI to make diagnosis decisions and you were hurt, do you have a medical malpractice case? We can help determine your options.
What we call AI is really a complex mathematical instruction called an algorithm that tells the computer what to do. This allows for high-speed automation of actions that would take a human much longer to complete. AI is said to “learn” by being fed a great deal of data from which it recognizes patterns for completing its task. In the case of medical diagnostic tools, AI is fed massive amounts of data and draws conclusions from that.
However, as the old saying goes, “garbage in, garbage out.” If the AI is fed poor data, it will draw poor conclusions. If the algorithm itself is faulty, it will draw incorrect conclusions.