How a bowel cancer examination revealed AI’s negative impact on doctors

Using AI regularly can potentially “deskill” health workers, a new study suggests.

Academics said that the finding is “concerning” given the rapid uptake of artificial intelligence (AI) across healthcare.

The new study looked at health workers who perform a test to look for early signs of bowel cancer.

Endoscopists perform a test called a colonoscopy to look for precancerous growths in the bowel known as adenomas.

This means these pre-cancerous growths can be detected and removed, preventing them from becoming bowel cancer.

Advances in AI technology have led to the development of computer-assisted polyp detection systems, which have been found to help these health workers spot more adenomas.

Researchers wanted to assess whether continuous use of AI led to a dip in performance when endoscopist perform colonoscopies without AI by analysing work conducted in Poland.

The research team analysed 1,442 colonoscopies conducted by experienced health workers before and after AI systems were rolled out at certain centres in 2021.

Writing in the journal Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology, researchers reported that the rate of detection of polyps was 6 per cent lower after the introduction of AI in standard and non-AI assisted colonoscopies.

“To our knowledge this is the first study to suggest a negative impact of regular AI use on healthcare professionals’ ability to complete a patient-relevant task in medicine of any kind,” said one of the study authors, Dr Marcin Romanczyk, Academy of Silesia in Poland.

“Our results are concerning given the adoption of AI in medicine is rapidly spreading.

“We urgently need more research into the impact of AI on health professional’s skills across different medical fields.

We need to find out which factors may cause or contribute to problems when healthcare professionals and AI systems don’t work well together, and to develop ways to fix or improve these interactions.”

In a linked editorial, Omer Ahmad, a consultant gastroenterologist and interventional endoscopist and clinical research fellow at University College London, wrote: “These findings temper the current enthusiasm for rapid adoption of AI-based technologies such as CADe and highlight the importance of carefully considering possible unintended clinical consequences.

“The study provides the first real-world clinical evidence for the phenomenon of deskilling, potentially affecting patient-related outcomes.”