How is AI transforming medicine?

Brian Cox (0:05)

Hello, I'm Professor Brian Cox. Welcome to A Question of Science recorded here at the Francis Crick Institute in London. Now, in the first series of this show, we asked whether we can harness AI for good, and concluded that it depends on a lot of things, but particularly on your definition of good.

But today, we will be looking specifically about how AI is transforming medicine, and asking what are the benefits and the risks of involving AI in one of the most personal aspects of our lives. AI is already used in a range of health care settings, from analyzing scans at lightning speed, to predicting the structures of millions of proteins that form the building blocks for new drug design. Here in the UK, the government has invested over 120 million pounds in these new technologies. But the public are raising concerns about the sharing of personal data, and what happens when tech companies run for profits, become integral to life and death decisions. Well, our panel are all experts on the use of AI in health care settings, and they are.

Mihaela van der Schaar (1:07)

I'm Mihaela van der Schaar. I'm a professor of machine learning, artificial intelligence and medicine at the University of Cambridge.

I'm also the chief AI scientist of the Crick Institute.

Indra Joshi (1:17)

Hi everyone. I'm Indra. I'm a doctor by background in emergency medicine, and I'm currently the chief product and medical officer at Optumemis.

Patrick Vallance (1:25)

Patrick Vallance, and I've been an NHS doctor and academic. I've been in the industry and I've been in government.

Samra Turajlic (1:32)

Hello, I'm Samra Turajlic. I'm a cancer physician and a research scientist. I'm a group leader here at the Francis Crick Institute, and as of last year, I became the director of the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute and an oncologist at the Christie NHS Foundation Trust.

Brian Cox (1:46)

And this is our panel. Now, I thought I'd begin just by asking each member of the panel, just really an optimistic question, I suppose. What are the areas in health care or medicine that you are most excited about in the context of AI?

Mihaela van der Schaar (2:05)

I hope you have quite a few hours for that.

Thomas Karnacott (2:08)

Yeah, you can have more than one.

Mihaela van der Schaar (2:10)

I'm going to have four very fast. So, I'm very excited about what the AI can do to empower patients and clinicians for an entire lifetime, from prevention to early diagnosis, to correct diagnosis, to if necessary treatment and follow up.

I'm also very excited about what the AI can do for improving health care systems. I know this may sound plebeian, but I think it's very exciting and important. We have very limited resources to identify who should be seen, when, by whom, how they should be follow up, and how the interaction among the patients and the resources operates. I'm very excited about AI for clinical trials, because clinical trials, many of them fail and recruit patients that are not representative. Finally, since I joined the Creek, I'm very excited about what AI can do to discover new mechanisms, mechanisms of disease and empower the biologists and scientists, not only at the Creek but throughout the world to make new discoveries using these AI tools.

Brian Cox (3:19)

Thank you. That's a list.

Mihaela van der Schaar (3:21)

That's a hard act to follow.

Brian Cox (3:24)

Beyond that, it's like a piping sketch already, isn't it?

Indra Joshi (3:28)

I think there are two things that really excite me at the moment. One is that decision support, so we can say either from a clinical aspect or from a patient aspect. Hopefully, many of you have used tools in your everyday life, and it really helps you make a decision clinically about, should I be going down this pathway or should I actually be explaining something in this way?

That's quite exciting. It's what I like to call democratization of medicine. The other aspect is really in the building of tools. So all of these things are tools that we build, products, workflows, et cetera, and AI is really exciting and we're seeing some real benefits in how it's speeding up some of those workflows, which we can go into later.

Brian Cox (4:09)

Thank you.

Patrick Vallance (4:10)

Well, I'm going to not pick on a specific AI function, but I'm going to pick on what I hope AI will do, which is fundamentally give more time for doctors, nurses and other healthcare practitioners to spend with patients. I think that time to create human interaction is actually a very important outcome that we should look for.