“Artificial intelligence & COVID-19: (bio)ethical aspects of end of life

Abstract

The disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus has brought significant challenges to clinical medicine. In this scenario, there is, naturally, the need to make decisions when faced with questions such as: defining which patients will be given priority in intensive care units and whether or not to submit COVID-19 patients to mechanical ventilation. The use of mathematical modeling could help to determine what type of screening policy could be useful in ICUs during the SARS-CoV-2. Another possible way of applying these techniques concerns the use of AI in determining personalized sedation and analgesia in the case of mechanical ventilation and extubation. AI techniques, especially those belonging to the machine learning area, allow for the construction and extraction of behavioral patterns implicit in decision histories, regarding a problem situation. Assuming the existence of a database of previous decisions that comprise, for example, the type of care to be used at the end of life or the therapy to be pre scribed to a patient, the patterns underlying this data can assist in choosing the most appropriate conduct to be adopted in each situation, provided it is prop erly extracted. In the current COVID-19 pandemic scenario, in which these decisions become even more pressing, this type of support can be of great value for ethically, more responsible, and fair conducts.