“All boats will rise with AI” - Gary Fritz (Vice President and Chief of Applications, Stanford Health Care)

In the 21st century, the coexistence of humans and AI has become a reality. Currently, 9 out of 10 medical organizations support AI for diagnostic enhancement. AI has started to alter the conventional ways in which doctors commonly diagnose patients. In the medical field, AI now diagnoses cancer, guides treatment, and even conducts prognoses on patient survival.

Integration of AI and machine learning (ML) algorithms into AI models led to higher accuracy and efficiency when detecting cancer, which is related to precise patient outcomes and reduced healthcare costs. These technologies also extend to underserved populations, and one AI system trained on 500,000 histopathological images from 1,500 breast and ovarian cancer cases is being launched in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi, giving equal health services opportunities to all. This allows normal people to benefit from faster and more accurate diagnoses. This also associates with SDG goal #3 ‘Good Health and Well-Being’, which ensures healthy lives and promotes well-being across all ages.

Moreover, AI guides treatment and predicts patient survival as well. A study published in the Harvard Gazette in 2024 introduced a versatile model used in cancer-associated fields, the Clinical Histopathology Imaging Evaluation Foundation (CHIEF). Similar to the language model ChatGPT, CHIEF performs diagnosis to guidance in treatment, in a faster and more accurate manner. Compared to the current AI systems that are only trained to perform specific tasks, CHIEF can perform a wide array of tasks. Not only does CHIEF show high accuracy when detecting 11 cancer types, but it also predicts the tumor’s molecular profiles and provides a precise prognosis. Specifically, it detects mutations in a tumor, taking into account the patient’s situation which can be seen through “CHIEF identified mutations in 54 commonly mutated cancer genes with an overall accuracy of more than 70%” according to (Pesheva, 2024). The CHIEF model further distinguishes patients with longer-term survival from those with shorter-term survival and outperforms other models by 8 percent. During the process, the model extracts novel insights that have not been discovered yet, such as finding the abnormal size ratios between different cell components.

In conclusion, AI has changed many aspects of our lives, including the medical field. Now, AI outperforms humans in terms of diagnosing and guiding illnesses. Although treating illnesses is still up to humans, we should prepare ourselves for the new era of coexistence between humans and AI.