Vimla L Patel, PhD, DSc, FRSC, will present: “Medical Expertise: Why and when is explanation needed?”
Abstract: Since medical practice is a human endeavor, rapid technologic advances create a need to bridge disciplines to enable clinicians to benefit from them. In turn, this necessitates a broadening of disciplinary boundaries to consider cognitive and social factors related to the design and use of technology in the medical context. My awareness of these issues began when I started investigating the development of models of medical expertise and the symbolic representation of medical knowledge in the late1980s. The last 30 years of multidisciplinary research on medical cognition in my laboratory have shown the remarkable importance of cognitive factors that determine how health professionals comprehend information, solve problems, and make decisions. These investigations into the process of medical reasoning have made significant contributions to the design of clinical AI systems. These systems offer great potential for progress to improve people's health and well-being, but their adoption in clinical practice is still limited. A lack of transparency in these systems is identified as one of the main barriers to their acceptance. My talk will elaborate on what we have learned about how medical practitioners acquire, understand, explain, and utilize expertise, focusing on cognitive-psychological methods and frameworks. It will also discuss how such work elucidates key lessons and challenges for the development of usable, useful, and safe decision-support systems to augment human intelligence in the clinical world.
Vimla L Patel is a Senior Research Scientist and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies in Medicine and Public Health at the New York Academy of Medicine. She is also adjunct Professor of Biomedical Informatics at both Columbia University, Population Health Sciences (Health Informatics) at Weill Cornell Medical College. and the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University. A cognitive science PhD graduate of McGill University in Montreal, she was a Professor of Medicine and the Director of Cognitive Science Center there. Her early research focused on medical decision-making and expertise with an interest in scientific foundations for medical education. She subsequently served on several biomedical informatics faculties as Professor at Columbia (2000-2007), Professor and Chair at Arizona State University (2007-2009), and Professor at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in Houston (2009-20011). An elected fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the American College of Medical Informatics, and the International Academy of Health Information Sciences, she was recipient of the 1999 Swedish Women of Science award. She received an honorary doctorate from the University of Victoria in 1998. An associate editor of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and editor of the Springer book series on Cognitive Informatics in Biomedicine and Healthcare, and she is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Intelligence-based Medicine. She is apast assistant editor of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and a member of the editorial boards ofMedical Decision Making, the Journal of Experimental Psychology, and Topics in Cognitive Science. As an active researcher, her current studies deal with the impact of technology on human cognition for safe and effective clinical practice. Her general interest lies in bridging natural and artificial intelligence, and the role of AI in augmenting human intelligence. She has over 300 scholarly publications spanning books and journals in biomedical informatics, education, clinical medicine, and cognitive science.