Tuesday, July 2, 2024

The ethical considerations of using artificial intelligence in cancer supportive care

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**AI in Supportive Care in Cancer: Enhancing Patient Care**

Supportive care in cancer involves preventing or managing the symptoms of cancer and the side effects of treatment, encompassing physical, psychosocial, and spiritual adverse effects. The application of artificial intelligence (AI) to supportive care in cancer involves using AI platforms that combine cancer knowledge bases, precision medicine libraries, and guidelines with patient data, including genomic profiles, laboratory tests, and medications.

**Personalized Decision Support**

AI can provide decision support to patients and clinicians in delivering personalized supportive care in cancer. This includes optimizing anticancer drug dosing to avoid toxicity and selecting appropriate supportive care in cancer drug dosing using a patient’s pharmacogenomic profile. AI enables a more accurate prediction of toxicities and can monitor patients to detect early signs of toxicity.

**Ethical Considerations**

Addressing ethical concerns relevant to using AI is crucial to reassure patients. Trust in AI rests on public perceptions of its accuracy, transparency in data usage, privacy, and the ability for patients to make informed choices about their health information. Non-maleficence is a key consideration, ensuring that adverse effects of supportive care in cancer treatment are minimal.

**Patient Information and Acceptance**

Improving patient information and acceptance of AI involves seeking informed consent for its use. Patients need to understand the likelihood of AI improving their outcomes and the impact on their quality of life. Global governance and regulation frameworks for AI are recommended to address data governance, consent, data protection, and data ownership.

**Accuracy and Transparency**

Ensuring the accuracy of AI output in publicly available chatbots is essential. Patients should be informed about the algorithm and training set used. Ownership of data and transparency in the AI decision-making process are critical for patient trust.

**Shared Decision Making**

Shared decision making involving doctors, patients, and AI is important in supportive care in cancer. Clinician time can be freed up by AI, enabling better engagement in supportive care. However, the increasing use of algorithms may impact patient autonomy in decision making.

**Ethical and Legal Implications**

Traceability of responsibility for adverse outcomes with AI is a major ethical concern. Legal implications, such as negligence in AI errors, need to be addressed. Just allocation of resources and access to AI-based tools globally are also ethical considerations.

**Conclusion**

AI tools have the potential to enhance supportive care in cancer by providing personalized solutions and patient support. Addressing ethical challenges and establishing global standards for governance are essential for patient acceptance and the impact of AI on patient-related outcomes.

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