Tumors: How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Patients

Searching for information online is never easy, especially when it comes to health. Who can you trust? Choosing sources, preferring information disseminated by institutions and scientific societies can be a good starting point. But this information, however accurate, is not always easily “digestible” by patients. Artificial intelligence, however, can lend a hand in all of this: it can in fact be used to create patient-friendly content starting from the reliable information contained in the guidelines of a given pathology. A team of researchers, mostly Italian (and involving several centers of excellence for urology ), tested AI as a support for streamlined and accurate information to support patients - taking urological tumors as a model.

AI can simplify specialist guidelines

The difficulty of combining correct information with accessible language was precisely the starting point of the researchers, as they explain in detail in the pages of Plos One . So their idea was to put a generative AI system to work, starting from the information contained in the guidelines for urological tumors of the European Association of Urology. Not that resources intended for patients do not already exist, but those available risk being too complex and must be updated with a certain regularity, the experts recognize. In this context, AI combines processing speed with a strong (sometimes too strong) capacity for synthesis and simplification.

AI alongside patients to better understand disease and treatments

To understand how much to trust and rely on artificial intelligence, the researchers, after generating information documents for patients translated into five different languages, evaluated their clarity, accuracy and readability by analyzing them with ad hoc tools, with the evaluations of experts in the field and with the qualitative judgment of about thirty young urologists. But not only that: these contents, developed for bladder, kidney, prostate and testicular tumors (localized and metastatic), were compared with those already intended for patients and present on the website of the European Association of Urology in the dedicated section. Well, the urologists could not say which resource they were evaluating, whether generated by AI or not.

The overall results indicate that these documents, created in just a minute, have better readability and accuracy and clarity than traditional patient resources, the study says. They also lack completeness of information. Translations were also judged overall to be good (though not perfect).

But be careful of the need for empathy

The final message, the authors conclude, is that AI - properly guided and validated by experts in the field - could help spread correct information to patients, in multiple languages. "This artificial intelligence tool - they write - can help doctors make it easier for patients to understand their tumor and find the best possible care." With some special care, the experts finally imply: for example, without forgetting the need for empathy of patients, a human need that risks getting lost in the language of a machine.