In the context of Healthcare Week Luxembourg (HWL), Philippe Turk, President of the Fédération des Hôpitaux Luxembourgeois (FHL) shares his thoughts on the benefits of AI adoption in healthcare and the future role of doctors.
What is the impact of AI on the healthcare system?
AI is transforming the healthcare system at every level, from drug research and development to diagnosis, imaging, early detection of disease and patient flow management. As it evolves, AI will become an increasingly ubiquitous support tool, helping to speed up the entire healthcare chain.
How is AI influencing the process of medical research and drug discovery?
When it takes ten years to bring a new compound to market, this timeframe is about to shrink dramatically. AI is transforming the research paradigm, moving from a traditional approach based on empirical and statistical trials – the so-called ‘double-blind’ method, with real prototypes and placebos – to a method centred on numerical analyses of thousands of cases, at infinitely accelerated speed, integrating patient data of many different kinds. AI enables the genuine coupling of new molecules with different digital devices used to collect data. This speeds up the validation process, saves precious time in research and the submission of regulatory dossiers, and enables us to move towards personalised medicine.
“It is the synergy between man or woman and machine, the ‘marriage’ between human skills and technological capabilities that brings real added value to medical practice.”
Philippe Turk, President of the Fédération des Hôpitaux Luxembourgeois (FHL)
What are the most promising uses for AI in the personalised treatment of patients?
AI is proving particularly promising in three key areas: the early diagnosis of diseases, the accelerated development of treatments and therapies, and the optimisation of treatment paths. AI will make it possible, for example, to work with ‘digital twins’, which can considerably reduce drug development times and lead to better therapeutic choices. The expected benefits of new compounds can be anticipated on a patient-by-patient basis. In oncology, for example, digital twins can be used to better characterise tumours, deduce those which are resistant to certain treatments, improve the detection of metastases and guide doctors towards more effective solutions. This is the concept of precision medicine.
How is AI changing the way diagnoses are made today?
First, the most obvious transformation is in medical imaging, where AI makes it possible to rapidly analyse huge quantities of images that no human could manage. As a result, it provides invaluable decision-making support for doctors and speeds up diagnosis exponentially. Second, the IoMT (Internet of Medical Things) offers tremendous advances in early detection, particularly for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s; sensors that analyse eye movement or leg movement, for example, can detect the first signs of a disease, by reading concrete observations against data pools, using AI.
Do you fear that AI could one day replace healthcare professionals?
AI is designed to assist the medical expert and to optimise and accelerate the accuracy of diagnoses and decision-making, not to replace human judgment. The doctor remains in charge of interpreting the data and implementing the personalised medicine. It is the synergy between man or woman and machine, the ‘marriage’ between human skills and technological capabilities that brings real added value to medical practice.
