AI in Healthcare by Julia Geffken

Personalized Overview

juliageffken — 2025-10-12 22:16:47 UTC

The industry of healthcare is a field where AI can provide more positives than negatives in a world where it’s abused. It’s been seen that AI replaces the job workforce to those who need it most, rather than aiding in the process. In healthcare, AI has been seen to prevent burnout in tedious tasks and pin point issues that a human eye wouldn’t see. One of my personal goals is getting into medical school, so educating myself on healthcare can show what the future has in store for medicine. Especially with half my family members being in the medical field, this has been a subject that is very personal to my everyday life. Seeing how AI could target, predict, and assess information could save countless lives and figure out personalized solutions. Not to mention, a common theme amongst women patients is that they aren’t taken seriously when it comes to assessing their health. An ongoing issue is not having the proper research on a woman's body to effectively treat them, AI could aid in the process of dismissal and find valuable solutions. In this research I will be covering how AI can detect early signs of cancer, assisting in surgeries, and personalized treatments.

Healthcare- AI and Personalized treatment

juliageffken — 2025-10-12 22:18:07 UTC

The use of patients data, medical imaging, and genetic profiles has made it possible to adapt patients into personalized treatment. The issue regarding medicine is that it's not a one size fits all treatment style, such as one patient might have a beneficial reaction towards a cancer medicine and another might be the opposite. That's why it’s important to take into account similar data patterns to optimize treatment plans with a faster recovery. Specifically, AI has been exceptional in the realm of oncology, especially being a tough system to navigate due to no specific cure. For example, the genomic characteristics can be used to navigate a patient's potential outcome to chemotherapy or immunotherapy. Especially with the use of wearable hardware to detect real time analysis from their vitals. The benefits that evolve from AI and personalized medicine is a more efficient treatment style. This could detect what medicine would be suitable for an individual's lifestyle and still take into account past health records. This saves time and money for the patient due to not going through countless trials of medicine that isn’t beneficial for their biological structure. Some limitations that are faced would be data privacy, especially when taking into account medical records (Sharma & Kaur, 2025). It's important that these companies handle this information with care and precision. Taking into account technology that has large amounts of personal data, if it's not properly protected data leakages could be used and sold. I found this subject personally interesting because this can help women who are underrepresented in healthcare, especially while medical textbooks incorporate male circulated treatments. This could open up more possibilities for understanding how different treatments could react better towards women.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42452-025-06625-x

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA7xwOsFffU

Healthcare- AI and da Vinci Robotic System

juliageffken — 2025-10-12 22:19:20 UTC

The da Vinci Robotic surgery is a console that assists surgeons with making incisions and appropriate pressure. This technology makes it possible for surgeons to make a procedure the least invasive it can be, meaning the recovery process is shortened due to less pressure from the incision. This robotic technology uses 3D vision, endowrists, and force feedback. Which in short means that technology is mocking human vision and range of motion for a more controlled surgery. Additionally, this console consists of 4 arms that have instruments, stapling, energy, and vision. This has brought a great deal of benefits through the use of AI, mainly drawing attention to the lack of burnout in surgeons and cheaper healthcare costs. Since the da Vinci Robotic surgery console uses 43% less force than the human hand, the recovery time leaves patients to be back on their feet faster. This means less anesthesia used, faster operation, and minimized check up appointments. This machine also collects real time data from surgeries, allowing the machine to draw more personalized conclusions on what makes the surgery the most successful. With that being said, the limitations followed would be the lack of control and reliability of a machine in general. While this console has been used vastly during surgeries, it’s not guaranteed that malfunctions won’t occur. If a malfunction does occur, the best case scenario is that it didn’t affect the patient’s wellbeing. This would lead to a complete switch to a manual operation which could increase the price and duration for the patient. Additionally, since this console is locked into place, the surgeon can’t move the patient into a certain position. If the patient's position were to be moved they would need to unlock the machine, reposition the patient, then lock it again (Intuitive Surgical, n.d.). This is interesting due to the amount of surgeries actually completed using this technology. It was seen that there were more than 14 million surgeries using the da Vinci System.

https://www.intuitive.com/en-us/patients/da-vinci-robotic-surgery

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICddJk0Ec9M

Healthcare- AI and Cancer

juliageffken — 2025-10-12 22:19:57 UTC

This dataset learning technology uses patients' medical records to evaluate the coding of disease. Cancer symptoms aren’t a clear cut answer, which in term makes it harder to depict if a screening is necessary for a patient. A vital example of this would be the Penn medicine scientists developing an AI tool to detect even microscopic cancer cells within a patient's scan. This new technology could assist radiologists in flagging the scans that need extra attention. Additionally, reducing the burnout in doctors that have to go through hundreds of scans a day. This is not only beneficial for people in healthcare but also individuals with a lower income, seeing as though screenings aren’t cheap. With that being said, with every pro comes a con, there's a fine line of ethicality between malpractice and AI (Cancer Research Institute, n.d.). The issue surrounding the diagnosis is who takes accountability for the mistake, does the doctor or does the technology based software. Additionally, you don’t want radiologists who are trained in this field to heavily rely on technology to do their job for them, ultimately leading to mistakes. This is interesting to me because knowing so many people in my family who lost their lives to cancer, this can be a life saving circumstance. Having access to technology that can detect something a radiologist might miss is something that hospitals need to integrate into their systems.

https://www.cancerresearch.org/blog/ai-cancer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtdXAZ048hA

Future Trends and Ethical Concerns

juliageffken — 2025-10-12 23:32:34 UTC

The future trends and ethical considerations that we need to take into account for the healthcare industry is how we actually use it. There's a fine line between using AI to replace individuals rather than using it to strengthen the field of medicine. In one stance, the use of AI and healthcare can create a more efficient and faster experience for both the patient and healthcare staff. Such as, navigating individuals through a confusing website using a chatbot. Especially those that need healthcare the most are usually older individuals who aren’t familiar with modern day technology. An assisted chat based dialogue can help them get quick answers with scheduling and billing. Additionally, this feeds into the ethicality of collaborating with human staff. Rather than having this chat bot completely take over administrative work, this could guide individuals to easily answered questions and leave the more in depth private conversations for humans. This creates a more hand in hand work environment to speed up customer care without having individuals wait on the phone, while additionally preserving their employment. Another instance of future developments could be the transparency of using AI during the process of treatment, diagnoses, and data. Letting patients know that their information would be used in the development of Artificial Intelligence is a simple yet crucial factor for customers' trust. Especially with the risk of potential data leaks and incorrect diagnoses. While there are a lot of positives to AI and healthcare, it’s still a work in progress, that’s why I think it’s highly important to have humans to have main control over these processes.

Societal Impact

juliageffken — 2025-10-12 23:33:04 UTC

The societal impact that AI has on the field of healthcare could be the continuation of biases in the medical field. Especially those of lower socioeconomic status, marginalized groups, and women. Since AI is based on patterns of real life instances this means the recurring pattern of bias will transfer over as well. This means less effective treatments could be dealt to those who already are underrepresented. Additionally, job displacement is one of the biggest issues coming to a head within Artificial Intelligence. Especially those that need employment the most, such as front desk administration, scheduling, and assistance. Since technology usage is drastically less expensive for instances such as billing and scheduling, this makes businesses more inclined to adopt AI rather than human employment. Not to mention the growing development of AI also means the growing risk of data privacy. These healthcare systems need to confirm consent before using their information for data, regardless if its scans, blood work, or medication interaction. Rather than hiding this technology usage, it’s important to be upfront about how it could potentially affect their privacy. This information could be potentially sold for financial gain which violates HIPAA regulations. The last thing a patient wants is an email apologizing for their data being leaked without being aware they consented in the first place. These societal impacts on healthcare regarding AI is something that people need to inform themselves on, while AI can create beneficial forms of aid in healthcare it's important to consider the cons.

Reflection

juliageffken — 2025-10-12 23:33:29 UTC

Reflecting on all the research being shown such as the potential gains like personalized treatment, early diagnoses, and precise surgeries, do come with a limitation that needs to be addressed. There's no getting around that Artificial Intelligence is being integrated into everyday life pretty fast, but regulations and data privacy also needs to be something that comes first. Every company and website needs to be completely transparent in every aspect of AI use, especially if they’re using human information that they’re potentially selling. Additionally, it needs to target the potential biases that transfer over from real world events to AI data patterns, addressing the unfairness especially in the employment field is extremely important fir future development.

Citations

juliageffken — 2025-10-12 23:39:43 UTC

Cancer Research Institute. (n.d.). How AI is helping in the fight against cancer. https://www.cancerresearch.org/blog/ai-cancer

Intuitive Surgical. (n.d.). Da Vinci robotic surgery. https://www.intuitive.com/en-us/patients/da-vinci-robotic-surgery

Johns Hopkins Medicine. (2023, September 12). How artificial intelligence is transforming healthcare. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA7xwOsFffU

Mayo Clinic. (2024, February 22). How artificial intelligence is changing healthcare. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICddJk0Ec9M

Sharma, R., & Kaur, H. (2025). Artificial intelligence in personalized medicine: Benefits, challenges, and future directions. SN Applied Sciences, 7(3), Article 6625. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42452-025-06625-x

juliageffken — 2025-10-13 00:15:21 UTC