Artificial Intelligence in The Healthcare System; A Cross-Sectional Study Involving Medical Students

Abstract

Introduction: Artificial Intelligence has brought revolutionary changes in the medical field in terms of diagnosis, surgeries, rehabilitation, and in deciding the prognosis of the disease. Methods: This is a Cross-sectional study. Sample size was 210. Convenience sampling was used. Medical students from 1st year to final year were included in this study. Medical students who were foreigners were excluded from this study. A pre-made questionnaire to assess the knowledge and perceptions regarding Artificial Intelligence was employed. Data collection was completed from September 2022 to December 2022. IBM SPSS Statistics 26 and Microsoft Excel were used for data analysis. Results: Only 13% students understood what is meant by neural network. 63.9% of participants believed that AI is able to analyse patient information to reach diagnosis. With 65.4% believing that AI would able to help to establish prognosis. 60.1% expressed their confidence in AI to replace human in performing surgery. 40.3% agreed that AI poses a threat to physicians by reducing the number of jobs available to them. An overwhelming majority of 73.9% of the view that health equity would face quite a lot of new challenges if AI steps in medicine. Only 18.9% students agreed that their medical curriculum is sufficiently educating them to use AI tools. 77.7% of students agreed that AI skills should be ingrained in medical training. Conclusion: Medical students lack understanding of the AI but quite optimistic that AI has the potential to transform the existing healthcare practices. Students believed that training in AI competencies should be added in their curriculum so that they can be well equipped with upcoming challenges. Keywords: artificial intelligence, healthcare system, medical students.

Keywords

• Artificial Intelligence, Healthcare, Medical Students.