Mapping research strands of ethics of artificial intelligence in healthcare: A bibliometric and content analysis

Abstract

The growth of artificial intelligence in promoting healthcare is rapidly progressing. Notwithstanding its promising nature, however, AI in healthcare embodies certain ethical challenges as well. This research aims to delineate the most influential elements of scientific research on AI ethics in healthcare by conducting bibliometric, social network analysis, and cluster-based content analysis of scientific articles. Not only did the bibliometric analysis identify the most influential authors, countries, institutions, sources, and documents, but it also recognized four ethical concerns associated with 12 medical issues. These ethical categories are composed of normative, meta-ethics, epistemological and medical practice. The content analysis complemented this list of ethical categories and distinguished seven more ethical categories: ethics of relationships, medico-legal concerns, ethics of robots, ethics of ambient intelligence, patients' rights, physicians’ rights, and ethics of predictive analytics. This analysis likewise identified 40 general research gaps in the literature and plausible future research strands. This analysis furthers conversations on the ethics of AI and associated emerging technologies such as nanotech and biotech in healthcare, hence, advances convergence research on the ethics of AI in healthcare. Practically, this research will provide a map for policymakers and AI engineers and scientists on what dimensions of AI-based medical interventions require stricter policies and guidelines and robust ethical design and development.