Ethical issues deriving from the delayed adoption of artificial intelligence in medical imaging

Abstract

Medical imaging (MI) has assumed a central role in medicine. Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized computer vision and it is also approaching to impact deeply MI. Fundamental ethical matters have raised and teams of experts around the world are involved in defining ethical borders for AI in MI. However, reading the extremely detailed proposals, it is clear that the treated ethical arguments have been completely redefined and specifically structured for AI in MI. Instead, many of them should be inherited from other technologies already in use in MI. The complete re-definition of ethical principles could produce contradictions and delays for AI adoption in MI, thus arising important ethical concerns. In this paper, potential ethical issues related to AI delay are presented: the objective is to contribute to reuse some concepts from other technologies to streamline the arguments and avoid these concerns.