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Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy
Published in: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 1/2020

01-03-2020 | Artificial Intelligence | Scientific Contribution

The right to refuse diagnostics and treatment planning by artificial intelligence

Authors: Thomas Ploug, Søren Holm

Published in: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy | Issue 1/2020

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Abstract

In an analysis of artificially intelligent systems for medical diagnostics and treatment planning we argue that patients should be able to exercise a right to withdraw from AI diagnostics and treatment planning for reasons related to (1) the physician’s role in the patients’ formation of and acting on personal preferences and values, (2) the bias and opacity problem of AI systems, and (3) rational concerns about the future societal effects of introducing AI systems in the health care sector.
Footnotes
1
In this paper we use the term ‘AI systems’ to cover both systems based on ‘symbolic AI’ and systems based on machine learning techniques such as deep learning and neural networks.
 
2
In this paper we use the term ‘physician’. Diagnostic and treatment decisions are also made by many other types of health care professionals, but we are focusing on medical doctors because they are involved in many of these decisions.
 
3
There is a parallel issue raised by AI controlled treatment, e.g. AI controlled surgical robots, but this is outside the scope of this paper.
 
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Metadata
Title
The right to refuse diagnostics and treatment planning by artificial intelligence
Authors
Thomas Ploug
Søren Holm
Publication date
01-03-2020
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy / Issue 1/2020
Print ISSN: 1386-7423
Electronic ISSN: 1572-8633
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-019-09912-8

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