The Spanish Society of Internal Medicine (SEMI) emphasizes the significance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data in healthcare, stating they represent "the present and the future" for managing vast amounts of patient data.
SEMI advocates for the potential of generative AI in diagnosis and treatment planning, while discriminative AI can predict adverse events and monitor chronic diseases. These technologies are deemed essential for decision-making, research, and management in the medical field.
However, SEMI also acknowledges the challenges of AI implementation, highlighting the need for improved data interpretability and transparency to foster trust among healthcare professionals and patients. Ethical considerations and regulatory compliance are crucial for the proper integration of AI in existing systems.
AI should complement human clinical expertise rather than replace it, as SEMI stresses the importance of training professionals to use these tools effectively. Discriminative AI, which focuses on data classification and prediction, is already being utilized in radiology through tools like PathAI and Zebra Medical Vision, aiding early detection of cancers and heart diseases.
Additionally, AI facilitates telemonitoring for chronic disease patients, creating a new form of epidemiological surveillance and identifying potential health risks through suggestive phenotypes.