AI is one of the main frontiers of modern medicine. There’s a lot of excitement about its potential to make diagnosis more efficient and treatment more individualized, but there are also concerns about the practicalities, such as how to ensure that the AI has the best, most comprehensive data when making its predictions or suggestions (https://longevity.technology/news/can-ai-help-you-live-longer/).
Part of what makes AI special is its ability to learn, but that means any artificial intelligence can only be as good as its source material. If it is reliant on small samples and biased data, it is not going to produce the most accurate results. Of course, ensuring that AI has access to wider pools of information comes with other concerns, particularly when it comes to privacy. It’s important to ensure that people can provide informed consent to their data being used to train an AI and that any database is compliant with HIPAA regulations.
In the context of healthcare, one of the main missions of longevity companies like Fountain Life is to make AI an effective part of preventative medicine. Instead of waiting for someone to be seriously ill, they want to ensure early interventions so disease can be avoided or its impact can be minimized. Of course, this means you need to be able to identify health problems before they’re clearly visible, before symptoms start to manifest.
It’s possible that AI will be able to detect disease long before the human eye, but to do that, it needs to know how to recognize the early warning signs of illness. It can’t do that if its only training materials have been people who were already showing significant symptoms. Of course, if you don’t know someone is ill, why would you bother to include them in your dataset of sick people?
We’re already using AI to analyze CT and MRI scans, looking for signs of everything from cancer to dementia. Better AI with better data could discover new biomarkers that we don’t even know exist yet. The potential is huge for diagnosing all kinds of conditions, some of them life-threatening. In addition to cancer and dementia, this could include cardiovascular or metabolic disease.
The use of AI in medicine is still in its early days. If scientists can find the safest, most ethical and most efficient ways to use it, it could revolutionize diagnostics and preventative healthcare.
