Few doctors see AI as a threat to their profession. On the contrary, it can prove valuable in helping to diagnose rare diseases which number in the thousands, indicates a survey revealed by France Inter.
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Eight out of 10 doctors (81%) consider that artificial intelligence can help improve the diagnosis of rare diseases, reveals an Ifop survey for Sanofi that France Inter exclusively reveals on Thursday February 29, International Rare Disease Day. A disease is said to be rare when it affects one person in 2,000. More than three million French people are affected by one of the 7,000 rare diseases known to date.
These rare diseases are difficult to diagnose, as doctors are not specialists in them. 92% of doctors surveyed by the study believe that it is difficult to diagnose a rare disease, even though 45% of doctors have already been involved in this type of diagnosis. Faced with this observation, eight out of ten doctors believe that artificial intelligence can help them make a diagnosis.
Impossible for a human brain to know all the signs
“If we talk about rare diseases, it is completely impossible for a human brain to know all of these 7,000 diseases and to know all the signs”, underlines to France Inter Hubert de Boysson, professor of internal medicine at the Caen University Hospital (Calvados). He explains that “AI has the ability to remember and know all of these diseases and the symptoms that constitute them”. It can therefore represent “a valuable diagnostic aid that goes beyond the capabilities of the human brain.”
Artificial intelligence for the benefit of medicine can consist in particular of accelerated analysis of medical imaging, genomic sequencing or even decision-making algorithms. These tools could, in the long term, reduce the wait for patients to know precisely their illness. Nearly one in five doctors (17%) have already used automated AI interpretation and more than half say they are willing to use it.
According to this survey, relatively few doctors see AI as a danger for their profession. 26% think that artificial intelligence can threaten their profession. This proportion is much higher among the entire working population (47%).
Methodology
This Ifop study for Sanofi was carried out by telephone from January 22 to February 7, 2024 with a sample of 600 doctors, representative of the population of active general practitioners and pediatricians and a representative national sample of 1,000 elderly French people. 18 years and over.
