Abstract
Objectives: The medical community is in agreement that artificial intelligence (AI) will have a radical impact on patient care in the near future. The purpose of this study is to assess the awareness of AI technologies among health professionals and to investigate their perceptions toward AI applications in medicine. Design: A web-based Google Forms survey was distributed via the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust e-newsletter. Setting: Only staff working at the NHS Foundation Trust received an invitation to complete the online questionnaire. Participants: 98 healthcare professionals out of 7,538 (response rate 1.3%; CI 95%; margin of error 9.64%) completed the survey, including medical doctors, nurses, therapists, managers, and others. Primary outcome: To investigate the prior knowledge of health professionals on the subject of AI as well as their attitudes and worries about its current and future applications. Results: 64% of respondents reported never coming across applications of AI in their work and 87% did not know the difference between machine learning and deep learning, although 50% knew at least one of the two terms. Furthermore, only 5% stated using speech recognition or transcription applications on a daily basis, while 63% never utilize them. 80% of participants believed there may be serious privacy issues associated with the use of AI and 40% considered AI to be potentially even more dangerous than nuclear weapons. However, 79% also believed AI could be useful or extremely useful in their field of work and only 10% were worried AI will replace them at their job. Conclusions: Despite agreeing on the usefulness of AI in the medical field, most health professionals lack a full understanding of the principles of AI and are worried about potential consequences of its widespread use in clinical practice. The cooperation of healthcare workers is crucial for the integration of AI into clinical practice and without it the NHS may miss out on an exceptionally rewarding opportunity. This highlights the need for better education and clear regulatory frameworks.
Highlights
Artificial intelligence (AI), described as the ability of a digital computer to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings (Copeland, 2020), is not a new concept
The most successful domain of medical AI applications is that of AI-assisted analysis of radiological images (Yu et al, 2018), which utilizes deep learning to recognize disease patterns that could be missed even by experts
We investigated the prior knowledge and opinions on the subject of AI of a variety of health professionals at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust using an online survey
Summary
Artificial intelligence (AI), described as the ability of a digital computer to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings (Copeland, 2020), is not a new concept. The most successful domain of medical AI applications is that of AI-assisted analysis of radiological images (Yu et al, 2018), which utilizes deep learning (a specialized subset of machine learning that uses neural networks to learn from unstructured data) to recognize disease patterns that could be missed even by experts. A paper published on Nature shows that an AI system could outperform radiologists in the detection of breast cancer in mammograms (McKinney et al, 2020), while very recently an international team developed a diagnostic capable of predicting whether a patient is likely to have COVID-19 based on their symptoms (Menni et al, 2020)
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