Guideline on Clinical Application Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Ophthalmology (2023)

ABSTRACT

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been widely applied in computer-assisted diagnosis, monitoring of managing procedure and evaluation of prognosis for eye diseases recently. With a rapid development of AI in ophthalmology, the application of AI in clinical practices is receiving increasing attention. The eye is an important and complex human sense organ, composed of neural, muscular, glandular, and osseous tissues. The transparency of eye provides a condition of visualization for imaging examination of ocular and systemic diseases and this is an important basis of AI diagnosis. However, on one hand, AI-assisted diagnosis of eye or systemic diseases based on use of big data and images from human eyes faces some challenges of medical ethics. On the other hand, the norm-based ethics of AI-medical practice has not yet been established so far. Herein, based on the current situation of AI application in clinical use and research of ophthalmology, an guideline for ethics of clinical application of artificial intelligence in ophthalmology (2023) was drawn up by a consensus expert group comprising senior ophthalmologists, AI developers and medical ethics researchers on the basis of summarization of the existing ethical, legal problems and some documents, extensive investigation and discussion to provide suggestions for the standardized construction of AI clinical application, which expected to safeguard the rights and interests of patients, improve the work quality and efficiency and promote the development of AI application in ophthalmology.