(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2024-02-22)
Braunstein, Mark
Healthcare and AI have an intertwined history dating back at least to the 1960's when the first 'cognitive chatbot' acting as a psychotherapist was introduced at MIT. Today, of course, there is enormous interest in and excitement about the potential roles of the latest AI technologies in patient care. There is a parallel concern about the risks. Will human physicians be replaced by intelligent agents? How might such agents benefit patient care short of that? What role will they play for patients. We'll explore this in a far-ranging talk that includes a number of real-world examples of how AI technologies are already being deployed to hopefully benefit those physicians and their patients.
Computers have been used in healthcare from their earliest days. Much visionary work was done in the 1950's and 60's but it inevitably failed to achieve acceptance for technical and non-technical reasons we will discuss. As a result, healthcare is correctly widely viewed as the last major industry to embrace the information age. That is changing. We will explore the new technology landscape and look at some of the early transformative applications it has enabled around the world.