Soon there will hardly be a field in which artificial intelligence (AI) is not applied to a significant degree. “AI is growing into all medical disciplines. The systems are making great progress within a few weeks,” said Viennese oncologist Christoph Zielinski and chairman of the Central European Cooperative Oncology Group (CECOG).
On January 12, CECOG is organizing a symposium in Vienna with well-known experts on the vision, reality and legal aspects of these systems. “Last July I had ChatGPT draw up a treatment plan for a patient with so-called Her-2-positive breast cancer. That was quite ‘modest’. Now I have repeated that. And what came out of it was certainly meaningful. And patients already come to me with these or similar ‘documents’. They may have ‘googled’ in the past. These are questions on a completely different level,” says Zielinski.
The question of how doctors will deal with “Dr. ChatGPT” in doctor-patient communication is only a small part of the equation. “AI will play an increasingly important role in data creation, in the laboratory, in diagnostics, in pathology, in treatment decisions and in many other areas,” the oncologist explains.
AI helps in radiology
The example of radiology is well-known, where imaging systems are designed to identify possible disease processes. Such applications were among the first areas where artificial intelligence penetrated and directly supported radiologists.
Help with decision-making about diagnosis and treatment choice will certainly be added. “But AI will also have an impact on the pharmaceutical industry. And ultimately it also concerns scientific publications,” says Zielinski. For example, rules will have to be developed for what should really be considered original and what should be considered plagiarism.
The symposium is about AI applications in hospitals and private practices, in the fields of radiology, pathology and histology, but also about ethics and finally the legal aspects. The EU recently announced extensive regulations here.
“This ‘AI law’ will apply as a regulation in all EU member states,” said Nikolaus Forgo, professor of technology and intellectual property law at the University of Vienna, who was part of the scientific committee for the attic event. from the Faculty of Law of the University of Vienna.
Between risk and opportunity
The EU regulation is described as the world’s first set of rules for AI. This should be viewed with caution, as the legal scholar explained: “China has already started to regulate.” In the Western world there are at least two directions. “We in Europe interpret AI very much as a risk. In the US it is seen more as an opportunity.” That is why they want to quickly establish preconditions in Europe that apply equally in all EU countries. In the US, they do not want to stifle possible innovations through potentially hasty restrictions.
“Of course, ultimately the question of responsibility also arises. Ultimately, the doctor will always be responsible,” Zielinski said. AI applications in technical devices and processes in the EU will be divided into four risk categories. The highest will likely define applications that are no longer acceptable and is intended to prevent them. “Medical devices will probably fall into the upper middle segment and have to meet fairly high standards. This will be relatively complex for the providers,” says Forgo. If violations occur, suppliers of the affected products face high fines. The lawyer explained that Austria wanted to quickly adopt the EU requirements. The establishment of a national body for the assessment and assessment of AI products will also be of great importance.
Source: Krone
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