Yair Lotan, MD, on ethical considerations for AI in urology

In this interview, Yair Lotan, MD, shares ethical considerations for the integration of artificial intelligence into urologic care. Lotan is the chief of urologic oncology and a professor of urology at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas.

Video Transcript:

I'm not an ethicist. People have, at least in the common news media, they talk about [how] AI is going to take over, and there's a lot of scary stories. I don't think it's necessarily applicable to urologic applications. I don't think the AI program has a risk from a standpoint of annihilating mankind. But I do think it's important for people, when they're developing these programs, to think about how they might be applied. And also, what were the distribution of patients? Were there all Caucasians? Did they represent Black people and Hispanic people? Are we going to have algorithms that are relevant?

In the beginning of human pharmaceutical research, it was all done in men and then applied to women on the assumption that men and women were identical creatures and [had similar] biology, etc, and it probably impacted the dosing. Suddenly everybody's getting dosed based on what a 50-year-old White man looks like, and we're going to give the same dose to women and elderly, etc. So, I think we have to be conscious that when we're developing these tools that we're inclusive. We all recognize, actually, that in bladder cancer, White people are more likely to get it than Black people. So, almost by definition, it can't be completely inclusive, just because of proportions in society and for the disease itself are quite different. But I think we do need to make an effort to be aware of how these populations are being studied, how these algorithms are being made, and how they're being applied.

This transcription has been edited for clarity.