Dr. Patel on the future of AI in urology

In this video, Neal Patel, MD, highlights key take-home messages from a session at the 2023 LUGPA Annual Meeting on artificial intelligence (AI) in urology. Patel is the chief technology officer, the director of robotics, and a practicing urologist at Advanced Urology Institute of Georgia.

Video Transcript:

AI is here to stay. I think that's the biggest key take-home message. AI is not going to replace physicians or urologists. It's going to help us decrease our workload and do a lot of the heavy lifting for us in the near future. One important takeaway that we wanted to hammer home is that AI will not replace urologists, but urologists who use AI will replace those that don't. It is one of those new Cambrian explosions of technology that we haven't really seen since the.com. boom. It's not a fad. It's not like crypto. This is something that we're seeing, it's almost like a generational technological evolution. As urologists, we want to be at the forefront of it. We want to be guiding those solutions. We want to be able to have a say in how our workloads are optimized and how the heavy lifting is done. Generally, as urologists, we're always the first to adopt new technology. We adopted robotics [and] really gave a role for the DaVinci robots. We adopted, before that, endoscopy. We are always looking for the newest and greatest technology, and AI is going to be there, especially for us. The things that we've been seeing coming out of this conference is there's roles for reducing physician burnout with automated note generation software, there's AI scribes, there's predictive analysis. There's even potential we saw today that prostate biopsies may not need to happen in the future, and that we can do virtual biopsies with just imaging alone. That's great for our patients. Great for us so that we can be more accurate in our diagnoses. The big takeaway is that we need to embrace it. We need to work together as a community of urologists to shape that future. I think we're going to see in the next 5 years a complete shift in our field in a very good way that's going to bring the humanity back to treating patients.

This transcription has been edited for clarity.