“Our results are concerning given the adoption of AI in medicine is rapidly spreading,” said study co-author Marcin Romańczyk from the Academy of Silesia in Poland. He urged additional research on the impact of AI on the skills of health professionals across different medical fields.
Colonoscopy is one of the most effective tools for preventing bowel cancer, allowing adenomas to be spotted and removed before they turn cancerous. AI assistance has generated excitement in recent years, with multiple trials showing higher detection rates when it’s used. But the study’s findings raise the concerns of “deskilling” — a slow erosion of expertise when clinicians rely too heavily on automated support.
The findings also raise questions about earlier randomized controlled trials that reported higher adenoma detection rates with AI assistance than without it.
“It could be the case that non-AI assisted colonoscopy assessed in these trials is different from standard non-AI assisted colonoscopy as the endoscopists in the trials may have been negatively affected by continuous AI exposure,” said another co-author of the study, Yuichi Mori of the University of Oslo in Norway.
The authors caution that the study’s observational design means other factors could have played a role.