BLOG: Embrace AI to excel in your field
I have a new best friend. But first, a little background.
I have an impressive library of health care books that I have collected over the years. My optometry collection includes Clinical Refraction by Irving Borish, Sir Stewart Duke-Elder’s System of Ophthalmology and, of course, all of Lou Catania’s Primary Care of the Anterior Segment editions. These books were my best friends in optometry school and my early career.
With the advent of the internet, I found a new friend in Dr. Google. As I slowly walked away from my bookshelf and spent more time on my desktop computer, I found a host of new information and access to recent articles. With lots of clicking and reading, I could find solutions to many clinical problems. As the internet expanded, more information became available, and as the filters of web searchers got better, the information became more relevant. How could this get any easier?
I was asked to review a book by friend and mentor, Lou Catania. This book was Foundations of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Bioscience. After reading and digesting this book, I was on a new path. One of the practical applications of AI is with large language models (LLM). These models have been rattling around in university research computer labs for many years but had always been clunky and required computer access to huge volumes of data. Enter Ashish Vaswani and colleagues at Google Brain and their paper, “Attention is all you need.” This work introduced the transformer model and spawned a host of practical LLMs that are now readily available for the everyday user.
I installed ChatGPT, one of the commercial LLMs, on my phone and met my new best friend. My relationship with ChatGPT (I call him Poindexter, or Pointy for short) is much more conversational. First, I needed to train Pointy about my optometry degree, private practice, hospital affiliation and research projects. With his updated database, he answers with technical details and advice on how I might use my ideas to design a research paper. In the clinic, I can ask Pointy about a systemic drug that the patient may be taking and learn about the reason for its use and the possible ocular complications. I can ask about a set of suspicious findings and develop a working diagnosis. I can discuss other relevant findings, and we may then change the diagnosis, or the conversation may lead to other testing. We can then discuss treatment options and management plans.
Pointy, like all of the LLMs, tends to “hallucinate.” This means he sometimes gets distracted by an incidental finding or finds a source on the internet that is not evidence based or just “junk science.” Because of that problem, I always have to have him give me his sources. Working with Pointy is like working with a really smart 4.0 optometry extern without the clinical experience or judgment to be left alone with the patient. Pointy is smart but not quite like Lt. Commander Data of the USS Enterprise-D, at least not yet.
AI is still in its infancy. The applications for optometry and medical care are staggering. Those of us who embrace it and learn to use it will excel in our field. As Mark Cuban said earlier this year: “There’s going to be two types of companies in this world: Those who are great at AI, and everybody else that they put out of business.” I urge you to download ChatGPT, use Gemini as part of Google Chrome or use Microsoft Edge. Learn to use these tools — and use them to improve your patient care and sharpen your skills.
Unlike that smart optometry extern, I don’t have to take Pointy to lunch. But when I do, at least he can calculate the tip.
References:
- Catania L. Foundations of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Bioscience. https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780128244777/foundations-of-artificial-intelligence-in-healthcare-and-bioscience. Published 2020.
- Vaswani A, et al. Attention is all you need. https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762. Updated Aug. 2, 2023. Accessed April 14, 2025.
For more information:
Scott A. Edmonds, OD, FAAO, specializes in vision-based neurorehabilitation at Edmonds Eye Associates in Philadelphia. He can be reached at scott@edmondsgroup.com, linkedin.com/in/scott-edmonds-3427a2a and on X @scottedmondsOD.
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