Colloquium Computer Science - Prof. Mario Cannataro, University of Catanzaro

Title: Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract:

Artificial intelligence (AI) has opened great and world-wide discussions in recent months about the roles and potential risks of using AI in all aspects of life, due to the deployment of novel deep learning (DL) software that can generate texts or other contents in reply to questions expressed in natural language. Thus, it is not surprising if similar discussions started also in medicine as a potential application field of AI, opening a series of questions regarding the potential as well as the challenges and risks of using AI in medicine.

Although AI and Machine Learning (ML) methods are used in medicine from many years, and some tools are accepted in medical practice, such as the classification of biosignals, the individuation of biomarkers in bioimages, and the data mining analysis of large datasets of clinical data, several unresolved challenges of using AI and ML in Medicine remain to be addressed.

Some challenges that need to be answered to fully use AI in medicine comprise: what are the (legal, ethical, etc.) norms the rule the use of AI in medicine? How the possible bias contained in the AI models is managed? How human expertise and values are integrated in AI algorithms? What are the essential rules and guidelines to ensure that AI application behave "as advertised"? How the training process and datasets are certified and approved? How explainability, bias and privacy issues are addressed?

The talk summarizes main opportunities and challenges of the application of AI in medicine and discusses possible future directions at various levels, including technological, medical practice and regulatory aspects.

Short Bio:

Mario Cannataro is a full professor of computer engineering and the director of the Data Analytics research center at the University "Magna Græcia" of Catanzaro, Italy. His current research interests include bioinformatics, health informatics, artificial intelligence, data mining, parallel computing. He has published 6 books and more than 300 papers in international journals and conference proceedings. Mario Cannataro is Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology 2nd Ed. and Associate Editor of Briefings in Bioinformatics and IEEE/ACM TCBB journals. He is a Senior Member of ACM, IEEE, BITS, SIBIM and AITIM.