Building Trust in Medical Use of Artificial Intelligence – The Swarm Learning Principle

An avalanche of medical data is starting to be build up. With the digitalisation of medicine and novel approaches such as the omics technologies, we are conquering ever bigger data spaces to be used to describe pathophysiology of diseases, define biomarkers for diagnostic purposes or identify novel drug targets. Utilising this growing lake of medical data will only be possible, if we make use of machine learning, in particular artificial intelligence (AI)-based algorithms. While the technological developments and chances of the data and information sciences are enormous, the use of AI in medicine also bears challenges and many of the current information technologies (IT) do not follow established medical traditions of mentoring, learning together, sharing insights, while preserving patient’s data privacy by patient physician privilege. Other challenges to the medical sector are demands from the scientific community such as “Open Science”, “Open Data”, “Open Access” principles. A major question to be solved is how to guide technological developments in the IT sector to serve well-established medical traditions and processes, yet allow medicine to benefit from the many advantages of state-of-the-art IT. Here, I provide the Swarm Learning (SL) principle as a conceptual framework designed to foster medical standards, processes and traditions. A major difference to current IT solutions is the inherent property of SL to appreciate and acknowledge existing regulations in medicine that have been proven beneficial for patients and medical personal alike for centuries.