The Philosophy of Expertise in the Age of Medical Informatics: How Healthcare Technology is Transforming Our Understanding of Expertise and Expert Knowledge?

• Main Author: Rządeczka Marcin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sciendo 2020-09-01
• Series: Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric
• Subjects: philosophy of expertise; expert knowledge; philosophy of medical informatics; computers in medicine
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.2478/slgr-2020-0035

The unprecedented development of medical informatics is constantly transforming the concept of expertise in medical sciences in a way that has far-reaching consequences for both the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of informatics. Deep medicine is based on the assumption that medical diagnosis should take into account the wide array of possible health factors involved in the diagnostic process, such as not only genome analysis alone, but also the metabolome (analysis of all body metabolites important for e.g. drug-drug interactions), microbiome (i.e. analysis of all bodily microorganisms interacting with host cells) or exposome (analysis of all environmental factors triggering potentially harmful cell mutations, such as UV radiation, heavy metals, various carcinogens, etc.). Deep data analysis is of tantamount importance for personalized diagnosis but, at the same time, hardly achievable by a regular human being. However, adequately designed artificial intelligence (e.g. a deep neural network) can undeniably be of great help for finding correlations between symptoms and underlying diseases. Nowadays AI applies to nearly every aspect of medicine, starting from the data analysis of scientific literature, through the diagnostic process, to the act of communication between physicians and their patients. Medical image processing algorithms greatly enhance the chances of successful recognition of melanoma or intestinal polyps. Communication tools designed for physicians use techniques known from social media to provide users with an opportunity to consult the case with colleagues from the same discipline. Natural language processing tools significantly improve doctor-patient communication by the automation of note-taking. Is this enough to support the claim that the non-epistemic competences in medicine are becoming more and more important? Can we attribute expertise only to a person? How is medical informatics changing the way most people usually understand human-computer interactions?