Ethical implications of AI (artificial intelligence) in healthcare mainly focus on surgical procedures : identification of ethical issues of AI in surgical procedures and ranking of ethical issues based on criticality

Abstract

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the healthcare sector, particularly within surgical procedures, presented advancements in accuracy and effectiveness while facing considerable ethical concerns. These concerns include transparency, medical data privacy, economic and accessibility challenges, algorithmic bias, human oversight, accountability, and the influence on professional surgeons.

This thesis identifies and prioritizes these ethical issues to ensure AI technologies' responsible and fair utilization in surgical procedures. The study aims to categorize the most critical ethical concerns, assess them based on criticality, and propose recommendations to highlight the three most critical issues.

A comprehensive literature review and a survey involving experts from healthcare, AI, and ethics fields were conducted to rank the identified ethical issues based on their criticality. The Multi-Criteria Group Decision-Making (MCGDM) method was implemented to assess and prioritize these ethical issues methodically.

The study found the most critical ethical issues, where transparency and explainability ranked the foremost concern, followed by medical data privacy and economic and accessibility challenges. Drawing from these results, the study proposed recommendations for healthcare providers, researchers, and AI developers to ensure transparency, enhance medical data privacy, and overcome accessibility barriers. Furthermore, it recommends reducing algorithmic bias, ensuring continual human oversight, and furnishing recurrent training for surgeons. These recommendations are geared towards promoting ethical and secure integration of AI in surgical procedures, enhancing patient results, and upholding trust in AI-driven healthcare systems. This study contributes towards highlighting and mitigating the ethical implications caused by AI in surgical operations, providing a framework for forthcoming research and recommendations for the most critical ethical concerns.