The human role to guarantee an ethical AI in healthcare: a five-facts approach

Abstract

With the emergence of AI systems to assist clinical decision-making, several ethical dilemmas are brought to the general attention. AI systems are claimed to be the solution for many high-skilled medical tasks where machines can potentially surpass human ability as for example in identifying normal and abnormal chest X-rays. However, there are also warns that AI tools could be the basis for a human replacement that can risk dehumanisation in medicine. In recent years, important proposals in the domain of AI ethics in healthcare have identified main ethical issues, as for example fairness, autonomy, transparency, and responsibility. The human warranty, which implies human evaluation of the AI procedures, has been described to lower the ethical risks. However, as relevant these works have been, translating principles into action has proved challenging as existing codes were mostly a description of principles. There is a great need to produce how-to proposals that are specific enough to be action-guiding. We present five human-focussed facts designed into a framework of human action for an ethical AI in healthcare. Through the factors, we examine the role of medical practitioners, patients, and developers in designing, implementing, and using AI in a responsible manner that preserves human dignity. The facts encompass a range of ethical concerns that were commonly found in relevant literature. Given that it is crucial to bring as many perspectives as possible to the field, this work contributes to translate principles into human action to guarantee an ethical AI in health.