The Future: Effect of AI on Urological Practice

MedTech Outlook | Monday, July 12, 2021

AI will mostly be utilized to inform, enhance, and supplement urologists’ practice rather than replace them. This frees up the urologist’s time to concentrate on the more challenging aspects of the patient-disease interaction.

FREMONT, CA: In medicine, artificial intelligence is a rapidly growing discipline. There is mounting evidence that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could improve healthcare delivery. Urology as a specialty will alter as AI gets more integrated into daily work. Trainees will be exposed to a rapidly changing working environment. AI is already being used to sift through the growing body of evidence-based medicine. The relevant features of the most up-to-date evidence can be brought into play during the clinician-patient encounter in real-time by incorporating this into the electronic health record. Computers will soon be able to make clinical decisions.

Traditional clinical examinations will become obsolete as information from portable ultrasound equipment and patient-entered data smoothly merge into the electronic healthcare record. Communication, compassion, empathy, and caring, on the other hand, will continue to be critical interpersonal abilities. AI excels in the high-level calculation, while high-level cognition will always be a human strength. As a result, AI will free physicians to focus more on the patient-doctor interaction by taking on some of the more rational, computable care components. AI will mostly be utilized to inform, enhance, and supplement urologists’ practice rather than replace them. This frees up the urologist’s time to concentrate on the more challenging aspects of the patient-disease interaction. As a result, ‘AI’ might be properly referred to as ‘Augmented Intelligence.’

The current research on AI in urology focuses primarily on the field of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), which has been around for decades. However, machine learning studies of large clinical datasets are only now beginning to emerge. Furthermore, there are just a few studies that support the use of AI in clinical practice. As a result, clinical proof demonstrating AI’s true transformational potential is currently scarce.

However, improvements in ‘big data,’ substantially expanded computer power, and economies of scale from cloud computing are already revolutionizing AI by enabling machine learning to reach humanoid levels of capability. As a result, the sector is now primed for major advances. Experts believe AI will aid in developing personalized solutions in our clinical practice by improving diagnosis and even prognosis of urological disease, providing novel insights into disease symptom trajectories, determining disease subtypes, and ultimately assisting in the development of personalized solutions.