Research project exploring clinicians’ perspectives of the introduction of ML into clinical practice

I recently received ethics clearance to begin an explorative study looking at how physiotherapists think about the introduction of machine learning into clinical practice. The study will use an international survey and a series of interviews to gather data on clinicians’ perspectives on questions like the following:

• What aspects of clinical practice are vulnerable to automation?
• How do we think about trust when it comes to AI-based clinical decision support?
• What is the role of the clinician in guiding the development of AI in clinical practice?

I’m busy finalising the questionnaire and hope to have the survey up and running in a couple of weeks, with more focused interviews following. If these kinds of questions interest you and you’d like to have a say in answering them, keep an eye out for a call to respond.

Here is the study abstract (contact me if you’d like more detailed information):

Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science that aims to embed intelligent behaviour into software in order to achieve certain objectives. Increasingly, AI is being integrated into a variety of healthcare and clinical applications and there is significant research and funding being directed at improving the performance of these systems in clinical practice. Clinicians in the near future will find themselves working with information networks on a scale well beyond the capacity of human beings to grasp, thereby necessitating the use of intelligent machines to analyse and interpret the complex interactions of data, patients and clinical decision-making.

Aim: In order to ensure that we successfully integrate machine intelligence with the essential human characteristics of empathic, caring and creative clinical practice, we need to first understand how clinicians perceive the introduction of AI into professional practice.

Methods: This study will make use of an explorative design to gather qualitative data via an online survey and a series of interviews with physiotherapy clinicians from around the world. The survey questionnaire will be self-administered and piloted for validity and ambiguity, and the interview guide informed by the study aim. The population for both survey and interviews will consist of physiotherapy clinicians from around the world. This is an explorative study with a convenient sample, therefore no a priori sample size will be calculated.