12 Worcester Business Journal | April 17, 2023 | wbjournal.com
FOCUS
H E A LT H C A R E
BY ISABEL TEHAN
WBJ Staff Writer
A
rtificial intelligence
technologies have the
potential to reshape how
diagnoses are made, if not
revolutionize diagnostics
in medicine. Already, technologies exist
to streamline the diagnostic process and
detect illness before a physician can.
But the technology should not be
fully relied upon just yet.
"e algorithm can be only as good
as the data that we give it," said Elke
Rundensteiner, professor of comput-
er science and founding director in
data science at Worcester Polytechnic
Institute.
It's a mistake to think that technol-
ogy immediately holds less bias than
humans. Artificial intelligence pro-
grams aren't developed in a vacuum:
In medicine, they are fed thousands of
data points from practitioners based
on real data from real patients, and the
AI learns to analyze based on data not
always representative of diverse groups.
Participation in clinical trials in
medicine is not representative of all
With the medical
world on the cusp of
an artificial intelligence
revolution, researchers
and clinicians are
excited about the
potential and wary of
technology implicitly
reliant on human bias
0
100
200
300
400
500
2017 '18 '19 '20 '21
Number of clinical trials
79
137
226
409
523
Increased trials
Clinical trials related to artificial intelligence
in the U.S.
Source: U.S. National Library of Medicine
At UMass Chan Medical School,
Dr. Neil Marya is researching how
to use artificial intelligence in
diagnostics of certain cancers.
PHOTOS | EDD COTE
