What if on your next doctor visit, AI was the one giving the diagnosis and not a specialist? While this type of software is already being developed, there is one that has been granted FDA approval. The question now is, as AI continues to develop, how does ethics come into play? Would you prefer to get a more accurate (though not 100%) diagnosis from a machine? What if the diagnosis is wrong, who is to blame?
For the first time, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved an artificial intelligence diagnostic device that doesn’t need a specialized doctor to interpret the results. The software program, called IDx-DR, can detect a form of eye disease by looking at photos of the retina.
It works like this: A nurse or doctor uploads photos of the patient’s retina taken with a special retinal camera. The IDx-DR software algorithm first indicates whether the image uploaded is high-quality enough to get a result. Then, it analyzes the images to determine whether the patient does or does not have diabetic retinopathy, a form of eye disease where too much blood sugar damages the blood vessels in the back of the eye. Diabetic retinopathy is the most common vision complication for people with diabetes, but is still fairly rare — there are about 200,00 cases per year.
In one clinical trial that used more than 900 images, IDx-DR correctly detected retinopathy about 87 percent of the time, and could correctly identify those who didn’t have the disease about 90 percent of the time.
The software is unique because it’s autonomous and there’s “not a specialist looking over the shoulder of [this] algorithm,” IDx-DR founder Michael Abràmoff told Science News. “It makes the clinical decision on its own.” This means that the technology can be used by a nurse or doctor who’s not an eye specialist, making diagnosis more accessible. For example, patients wouldn’t need to wait for an eye specialist to be available to get a diagnosis.
Read the article here:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17224984/artificial-intelligence-idxdr-fda-eye-disease-diabetic-rethinopathy