AI and Healthcare
A long-standing love of math
I've always been drawn to mathematics. Calculus was my favorite subject in high school, and I took two years of it. For about two decades I hardly used it, but I never lost my interest. Then, around 2015 or 2016, advances in AI caught my attention, and I started studying it seriously.
How I learned it
I began with a foundational text, Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville. I completed an online data science course and learned to code in R and Python. I also took the full online AI certification course offered by Stanford University via Coursera and taught by Dr. Andrew Ng, one of the foremost authorities on AI and one of the most gifted teachers I've ever learned from. His courses cover the mathematics and science behind AI, including deep learning, neural networks, and the calculus underneath them. If you want to understand how AI actually works, I strongly recommend them.
Around 2017, I also took NVIDIA's learning courses and attended their conferences in San Jose, California and Washington, D.C. At that point, AI was used only sporadically in healthcare, and the tools were far more limited than they are today. But NVIDIA's GPU architecture was pushing machine learning and computer vision forward quickly.
Beyond the classroom
Alongside studying, I've worked in healthcare technology myself. I spent time as Chief Medical Officer of a telehospital technology startup, where we developed a network of more than 50 hospitals across multiple states. We built the hardware and software that enabled remote hospital and clinic care for rural patients across numerous medical specialties.
I also served as CEO of a different patient-facing technology startup. It used computer vision and custom AI networks to analyze and categorize skin images, and potentially to recommend cosmetic products and procedures.
Where AI is today
Today AI is accessible to almost everyone, and there are excellent platforms and models available. In healthcare, here are a few ways we're already seeing it used:
- Automated dictation. Tools such as DAX turn a patient-doctor conversation into a structured note.
- Patient messages. Some practices use AI to draft responses.
- Chart review. AI can summarize long charts.
Healthcare adopts new technology more slowly than other fields because of regulation and patient safety concerns. Even so, AI is improving rapidly. Its strength is finding patterns in large amounts of information and using them to make new discoveries, and I believe that will be central to healthcare in the years ahead.
Where I see it going
For now, I see AI's main role in healthcare as education, decision support, and reducing errors. Over time, I expect it to play a larger part in diagnosis and treatment recommendations.
AI is a tool
My view is that AI is a tool, much like email and the internet. It can benefit the people who use it and others, and it can also cause harm. It has a real energy cost and environmental impact, so it should be used responsibly.
In many areas it greatly increases productivity and efficiency. In others, it doesn't fit well. Handing every task to AI can wear down the thinking skills we build through years of study, reasoning, and practice. So I encourage you to keep your own mind sharp, and to rely on AI for work that doesn't need to be done at the human level.
The infrastructure matters too
The same responsibility applies to the infrastructure behind AI. Data centers should be built and run with care for people, animals, and the environment, with guardrails in place. Some can be sited where their impact is small, and some of their waste heat may be usable for good purposes. The goal is to use AI, and build what it runs on, in ways that make the world and human society better.
How I use AI at DermDad
I use AI where it helps with research, writing and publication, analysis, and video and audio production. Everything behind DermDad, though, comes from my own ideas. My goal is always to give you the best knowledge and education I can, to help you improve your health and your life.