Jacobson, Jokela: What should we fear with AI in medicine?

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Will the threats associated with artificial intelligence be as bad as some fear? Or will AI be relatively benign? Could the answer be somewhere in between?

Perspectives on AI abound. Whether it be in medicine, security or education, new applications in search of an AI advantage continue to grow. This has prompted calls for well-intentioned restraint and regulation or, at the very least, slower growth and proliferation.

To alleviate some of that fear, we should consider one area in which AI is proving to offer significant benefits and potential: medicine and the delivery of health care. A recent article in Medscape Medical News highlights studies that give AI the advantage in delivering more precise and reliable medical care. Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, has argued that the future of medicine lies with AI, with benefits such as a reduction in medical errors and delivery of more robust diagnoses and treatment plans.

Some will argue that AI has no feelings and therefore cannot replace functions that demand human interactions, empathy and sensitivity. While it is true that AI has no feelings or ethics, AI medical systems do not need to feel; their patients do. And what patients want and certainly need from their physicians is their time and their attention, which demands patience, something that AI systems have in abundance. Indeed, patience may be construed by some as a surrogate for human empathy and sensitivity, while impatience may be interpreted as the antithesis of such human characteristics.

As corporations buy medical practices, ultimately influencing the practice of medicine and the delivery of health care services, physicians and health care providers are pushed to squeeze more health care dollars into tighter time windows. This provides an opening for more misdiagnosis and poor health care delivery. Indeed, the inherent conflict between money and service will only continue to grow as more health care practices are purchased by corporations, with shareholder interests as the overriding objective.

AI medical systems can process information infinitely more quickly than any human clinician. AI medical systems also have access to and can digest many times more medical data and knowledge than human physicians and clinical providers. This means that an AI medical system may spot an unusual condition that could expedite a diagnosis, identify an appropriate treatment plan and save lives — all at a lower cost. They may even identify a novel condition by exhaustively eliminating the possibility of all possible known diseases, effectively creating new knowledge by a process of elimination.

Yet AI medical systems have their limitations and risks.

The plethora of data being used to train AI medical systems has come from physicians and human-centric health care delivery. If such sources of data are overwhelmed by AI-generated data, at some point, AI medical systems will be primarily relying upon data generated from AI medical care. Will this compromise the quality of care that AI medical systems deliver?

Then there is the fundamental understanding of how AI medical systems work. Much of the output is observational based on complex statistical associations. Few, if any, medical personnel understand such models, how these models use data and how their outputs are obtained. Of course, much of clinical medicine is evidence-based, which in turn is based on clinical trials or extended observational experience. When viewed in this context, AI medical systems are taking a similar approach, with the time window to glean insights infinitesimally compressed.

Then there are the issues of data bias and privacy.

Medical data is inherently biased since it comes from a biased world. To cleanse such data would change the data, with unexpected consequences that may bias AI medical systems in unexpected ways. It may even compromise the efficacy of such systems. In the short term, if data bias issues are to be addressed, they should be managed at the back end, much like how human systems manage them today. The long-term objective is more complex, to have the AI systems themselves prune such biases in, shall we say, an unbiased manner.

The other issue of concern is data privacy, which appears overstated and often amplified, stoking fear. Privacy safeguards should always be considered, yet there are no foolproof ways to guarantee complete and total privacy. Many people inadvertently sacrifice personal privacy for personal convenience, often unthinkingly.

People often confuse personal privacy with personal control of their data. Yet permitting our personal data to be accessed with our blessing, such as we do when using social media, does not keep us any safer than if our data is accessed unknowingly by others.

AI medical systems need anonymized data as inputs. Protecting the integrity of the anonymization process is what we can reasonably expect.

Anything that cannot be easily understood may elicit fear. AI certainly qualifies. In a world filled with uncertainty and risk, AI systems of all kinds offer tremendous benefits. Yet the uncertainty and risk that surround us will not miraculously go away with AI. There are no free lunches in this regard.

Prudence and caution are reasonable. Efforts to stop or even slow AI advances are what we should really fear.

Sheldon H. Jacobson, Ph.D., is a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Janet A. Jokela, M.D., MPH, is the senior associate dean of engagement for the Carle Illinois College of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.

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Loons sent packing by LAFC in 2-0 defeat

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Minnesota United didn’t allow a penalty kick attempt through the opening dozen games this season.

Loons right wing back D.J. Taylor has  now given up two in the last two games, and the one he allowed to Denis Bouanga on Wednesday was all Los Angeles FC needed in a 2-0 win at at BMO Stadium.

Meanwhile, MNUFC (7-3-4, 25 points) was shutout for the first time in eight matches and saw its six-match unbeaten streak snapped.

With a golazo from Mateusz Bogusz serving as insurance in the 82nd minute, LAFC (8-4-3, 27 points) extended its winning run to four matches. They moved ahead of MNUFC with the three points.

The Loons appeared to take a 1-0 lead on a corner kick in the 29th minute, but an assistant referee ruled Joseph Rosales’ out-swinging service cleared the end line before Micky Tapias headed it home. Tapias’ smile was erased with the call.

That was the rare offensive bright spots for MNUFC.

Later on, Rosales put more corners over the end line, to cut out those set pieces before they could reach the box.

Bouanga, the 2023 MLS Golden Boot winner, was taken down by Taylor in the first half, and Bouanga calmly converted a penalty kick. Taylor was also whistled for a PK on Saturday, but Dayne St. Clair couldn’t bail out Taylor Wednesday like he did in the 3-3 draw with Colorado Rapids.

Teemu Pukki returned to the starting XI vs. LAFC, but the striker missed a close shot in the 62nd minute and his goalless drought extended to 570 minutes since early March.

The Loons had beat LAFC in their first matchup this season, 2-0 on March 16.

Lynx fall to two-time defending champion Aces

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Off to a strong start, and with the two-time defending champions in town, was Wednesday’s game the biggest of the season for the Minnesota Lynx?

Sure, coach Cheryl Reeve said pregame, because it’s the next one.

And the result is something the Lynx will surely learn from.

In a matchup of the top-scoring teams in the WNBA, Las Vegas pulled away in the fourth quarter for an 80-66 win.

Reeve said the Lynx defense was good enough to win, but the physicality of Las Vegas was problematic for the Minnesota offense that was too often stagnant.

“Our finest moments are when we’re getting in and out of screens quickly, when we’re seeking the paint and when we cut. … We just didn’t get that done with any frequency. Then Phee is trying to do something one on one, instead of movement, collapse the defense, play behind, and we’ve done that extremely well,” she said.

Napheesa Collier led the Lynx (4-2) with 18 points and 13 rebounds. She is trying to take the positive of when the game occurred.

“Now we can look at film, we know what it feels like we can scheme against it because we know what it looks like. And so instead of just trying to continue to play how we’ve been playing, we can go into things and get to things differently.”

A’ja Wilson led the Aces with 29 points and 15 rebounds, Jackie Young had 19 points and 10 assists and Kelsey Plum scored five of her 10 points in a key fourth-quarter stretch. Each entered the night averaging at least 20.8 points.

Entering the game shooting a league-best 47% from the field, Minnesota shot a season-low 36.9%. Its previous low for points was 82.

“We did get good shots. I missed some layups, we missed some open shots, Courtney missed some that she normally makes, we had some missed threes,” Collier said. “It was an off night for us. And, you know, kudos to Vegas because they played some really good defense. But we did miss a lot of shots that we normally make.”

Courtney Williams had 12 points and eight assists, Cecilia Zandalasini had a dozen points, but Minnesota was outscored 23-10 in the final 10 minutes, 26 seconds.

Down by 11 early in the third quarter, the Lynx got within one on a pair of free throws by Kayla McBride, but Kate Martin hit from deep and Wilson picked off a Williams pass and scored on a layup in the quarter’s final second.

Las Vegas (4-1) kept its hot hand into the fourth quarter.

Five points by Plum and a 3-pointer from Young put Las Vegas up by a dozen to cap a 13-2 run.

McBride scored from deep, but Wilson got four points inside and Young drained another 3 midway through the quarter to make it 77-61.

Miller update

Forward Diamond Miller, out the past three games with a right knee injury, underwent a cleanup surgical procedure Wednesday.

“She’ll be back,” Reeve said. “Scopes are typically four-to-six weeks. I don’t necessarily know they want to put that time on her.”

Miller had right knee surgery in April 2022 at the University of Maryland and had offseason meniscus surgery on her left knee that prevented her from playing overseas.

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Saints shut out Red Wings on the road in series’ game 3

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The Saints earned their fifth shutout this season on the road Wednesday with a 5-0 victory in Rochester, N.Y.

The scoring started early, with a single from Michael Helman and a Matt Wallner walk putting runners at first and second, and an opposite field home run from Yunior Severino.

Adam Plutko seemed to be recovering well from offseason hip surgery, with four shutout innings.

The Saints’ Alex Isola added a run in the sixth inning, and Severino ended the scoring in the seventh with an RBI single into left field.

Game four of the series is Thursday at 10:05 a.m.

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