Global Summit Keynote Address Explores Potential of AI in Rheumatology

The public good must not be overshadowed by the dizzying advancement and hype of artificial intelligence (AI), Keymanthri Moodley, PhD, MBChB, told the Global Rheumatology Summit at ACR Convergence 2024.

The safety of patients is of the utmost concern as AI rapidly advances into nearly every aspect of healthcare, leaving legal and ethical measures trailing behind, and diligence is needed to stay on top of unwanted and harmful ramifications on several fronts of the healthcare system, said Dr. Moodley, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Medicine and Division Head of Medical Ethics and Law, Faculty of Health Sciences, Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Social Medicine, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

She delivered the summit’s Keynote Address, Artificial Intelligence in Rheumatology: Risks of Ethical Debt, on Thursday morning, Nov. 14. This and the other presentations from the Global Summit will be available on-demand to all registered ACR Convergence 2024 participants after the meeting through Oct. 31, 2025, by logging into the meeting website.

“It’s important through the [research and development] process that we detect problems early and fix them,” Dr. Moodley said.

Traditionally physicians have relied on human intelligence, intuition, and experience to help diagnose and treat health issues. Management of big data offers an opportunity to augment human intelligence for solutions to health-related problems.

“There is clearly much potential for AI in the practice of rheumatology,” Dr. Moodley said. “If we take one of the most common rheumatologic conditions, rheumatoid arthritis, we know that diagnosis can be significantly improved by machine learning.”

Other areas in rheumatology that could benefit from the use of AI include deep learning using medical images, omics technologies to study rheumatic diseases, and patient-centered devices to monitor symptoms and conditions.

“It is possible today to have wearable technology,” Dr. Moodley said. “This could be particularly useful in predicting flares in inflammatory conditions.”

While physicians use multiple types and sources of data to reach a diagnosis, the role of the human physician remains very important across the globe. Yet change may be coming. According to an advertisement from China that Dr. Moodley shared, that country is developing the first AI hospital with robots that work as virtual doctors.

“This is not very common in many parts of the world, but is indeed something interesting to think about when we consider how healthcare might look in the future,” she said.

AI has also been important in clinical research. It has been used to accelerate clinical trials by refining eligibility criteria, recruiting study participants, and helping people interested in clinical trials to find the best match.

“The hype where AI is concerned certainly revolves around generative AI,” Dr. Moodley said. However, a concern with some of these technologies that can replicate aspects of human intelligence is that they don’t always use the most up-to-date data.

There also are many ethical challenges with AI, such as unequal access to information and communication technologies, cyber security, commercialization of data, and climate change. Another issue is ethical debt: the use of AI tools that are created and deployed without fully investigating and addressing the potential ethical consequences.

Evidence-based medicine is critical when practicing healthcare in the world of AI, Dr. Moodley said. For example, healthcare professionals need to play a larger role in the development of chatbots to ensure that the data used is based on good evidence.

“There are many risks with AI chatbots and other technologies, and we need to ensure that we do it responsibly, reliably, and safely,” Dr. Moodley said.