Anaesthesia

Biography

Biography: Harry Mc Grath

Abstract

The excitement of the second wave of Artificial Intelligence (AI) changing our lives beyond recognition is both exciting and challenging. AI has been around for over three decades, and this new approach of artificial intelligence and due enhancements in technology, both software and hardware has resulted in the fact that human decision making is considered inferior and erratic in many fields no more in medicine. This AI technology has the potential to transform medicine to a level never seen before in terms of efficiency and accuracy but also creating insecurity and allowing the transfer of expert domain knowledge to machines. Machine learning algorithms with access to large data sets can be trained to out perform humans in many aspects. AI effectiveness in accurate diagnosis of various medical conditions and machine learning algorithms has the ability to predict patterns in medical imaging systems and has been well documented for many years. However, applying AI to all areas of medicine such as anaesthetics cannot automatically be assumed to achieve improvements beyond human experts. It is often forgotten that it is "Artificial" intelligence that is being considered. Dangers of blind assumptions and belief in AI algorithms to outperform in areas of finance and industrial sectors have lead to disastrous consequences. Examples of humans working with machine algorithms have resulted in far better performance then depending solely on AI methods by replacing human intelligence. Anaesthetics is a complex medical discipline involving much of cognitive and dexterity based work and assuming AI can easily replace experienced and knowledgeable medical practitioners is a very unreasonable expectation. This paper focuses on the complexity of both AI developments and opportunities of AI in anaesthetics for the future. It will review current advances in AI tools and hardware technologies as well as outlining how these can be used in the field of anaesthetics.