Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Human Factors
Date Submitted: Sep 6, 2023
Date Accepted: Sep 13, 2024
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The promise of AI for radiology and pathology: A qualitative interview study on user's perspectives.
ABSTRACT
Image-driven specialisms like radiology and pathology are at the forefront of medical Artificial Intelligence (AI) innovation. As many believe AI will lead to significant shifts in professional roles, it is important to investigate how professionals view the pending changes that AI innovation would initiate, and to incorporate their views in ongoing AI developments. We have conducted the first qualitative interview study investigating the perspectives of both radiologists and pathologists regarding the development and implementation of AI. The interviews revealed a diverse range of perspectives on the impact of AI. Respondents discussed a variety of task-specific benefits of AI, yet both pathologists and radiologists agreed that AI had yet to live up to its hype. Overall, our study shows that AI could facilitate welcome changes in the workflows of image-driven professionals and eventually lead to better quality of care. At the same time, these professionals also admitted that many hopes and expectations for AI were unlikely to become a reality in next decade – directly contradicting the dire predictions about the pending obsolescence of the field made by the 'godfather' of AI dr. Geoffrey Hinton. This study also points to the importance of maintaining a ‘healthy skepticism’ for the promises of AI in imaging specialisms, and argues for more structural and inclusive discussions about whether AI is the right technology to solve current problems encountered in daily clinical practice.
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