Archana Venkataraman: What’s Missing From Our Current Conversation About AI and Medicine
Archana Venkataraman is an ECE Professor and contributed this opinion piece to Newsweek regarding AI
The current AI frenzy is focused on generative AI technologies like ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Gemini that create original writing, images, computer code, and even music. In medicine, people are throwing GPT at every problem under the sun, testing it as a scribe that can help doctors complete medical records, a chatbot that can offer public health advice, and a tool to diagnose patients and recommend treatment.
While many of these applications are promising, GPT is not the catch-all health care solution people want it to be. As a whole, AI has enormous potential to transform medicine. But we can do so much more with it if we use the right AI tools for each task and carefully combine them with existing scientific knowledge.
In my lab at Boston University, we use AI to map the brain and better understand disorders like autism and epilepsy. There are two big things I believe we’re missing in our rush to apply generative AI in health care.