Dermatologists receptive to artificial intelligence integration into clinical practice

Dermatologists have been mostly receptive of artificial intelligence integration into their clinical practices, according to a study.

“Various types of artificial intelligence (AI), including machine learning and its subfield, deep neural network, have been successful and increasingly implemented in the health care field during the past decade due to the ease of access to large volumes of data to feed AI algorithms,” Chapman Wei, MD, of Staten Island University Hospital Northwell Health, and colleagues wrote.

“We sought to assess differences in perceptions of AI based on age given that most previous studies about physicians around technology adoption sampled people who learned to use digital technology during their adult life,” the researchers continued.

A survey, emailed to physicians using the software SurveyMonkey, asked participants 18 questions regarding AI experience and satisfaction, as well as demographic information.

Of 850 emails sent, 90 individuals fully completed the survey, of which 86.7% were board-eligible or board-certified.

The median age of respondents was 41 years (range, 35-61), with 55.6% aged older than 40 years.

When asked about AI familiarity, 60% responded they were “slightly familiar,” while 13.3% responded “very familiar” and 26.7% said they were “not familiar.”

Also, 81.1% of respondents had not incorporated AI into their practices.

Most individuals (94.4%) said they would use AI for certain scenarios and 65.6% believed that AI would help analyze and manage electronic health records.

In addition, 51.6% believed that AI would somewhat enhance a physician’s ability to screen skin lesions therefore reducing misdiagnoses.

Significant obstacles to artificial intelligence integration in dermatology practices were identified as lack of standards and regulations (60%), lack of reimbursement (43.4%), difficulty in understanding and utility (38.9%), low level of image data (31.1%) and lack of information exchange (26.7%).

“Our results show that dermatologists are generally receptive toward AI integration into clinical practice,” the authors wrote. “Age did not have a significant effect on the perceptions of AI.”