Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionising our era, redefining reality. There is hardly a domain that AI hasn't influenced in one way or another, and paediatric medicine is no exception. AI is transforming how we access healthcare and diagnose, treat, and support children's overall health, opening the door to opportunities to ensure more effective and precise care for the younger generations. This article provides insight into the role of AI in paediatric practice and how it is set to reshape the future of the field.  

Overview of AI in healthcare 

Definition of AI 

AI is the field of computer science focused on creating technologies that simulate human intelligence to develop systems or machines capable of performing human-like tasks, including problem-solving, reasoning, learning, predicting, and planning.¹​​ These tools offer the advantages of improved accuracy and precision, greater efficiency and speed, and the ability to handle large volumes of data to reduce the burden on medical professionals and reduce healthcare costs.²

AI in healthcare 

AI is rapidly transforming healthcare through advanced technologies that address the health systems' different needs, allowing for enhanced clinical practice and better patient outcomes and satisfaction. Child health is an essential component of healthcare, and AI plays a crucial role in supporting the field by optimising healthcare access and supporting healthcare professionals and researchers.³ ​

Current innovations in AI for pediatric care 

Disease recognition and prediction  

Diagnostics is one of the areas that is witnessing the most promising AI-related technological advancements. AI models are taught to analyse the data collected from patient records, such as symptoms, relevant medical history, vital signs (i.e. breathing rate, heart rate, blood pressure and temperature), and test results. This integrated analysis allows the model to predict the risk of a certain condition – such as the risk of sepsis in newborns admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) – using the data generated during their stay, including the infant’s age, temperature, and pulse rate.² ​Likewise, the model can provide a list of plausible diagnoses by analysing a child’s data.

Paediatric radiology has much to gain when it comes to AI-based tools. Through using images created by radiological technologies like x-rays, computed tomography (CT) scans, ultrasound scans, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, AI tools have shown promising results in diagnosing and grading many conditions, especially those with subtle features that may pass unnoticed by the human eye such as some chest infections, rickets, and brain diseases.² Other visual images are also being increasingly interpreted by AI tools covering various medical specialities, including ophthalmology (diagnosis and treatment of eye conditions), pathology, dermatology, and genetic syndromes.

Patient monitoring and early warning 

Another application of AI algorithms is patient monitoring and surveillance, which is particularly valuable in critical care settings. Connected devices can continuously track patients' vital signs (like blood pressure, oxygen levels, and heart rate) and integrate these data sets to detect early signs of patient deterioration and send warning alerts to enable timely intervention and prompt management. For instance, AI applications can monitor blood glucose levels in children with diabetes and help detect any significant drop or rise in their glucose, or they can track the brain signals of children in a coma to identify seizures or epileptic activity that may not be easily detected.⁴ ​

Personalised treatment plans 

Personalised treatment plans are medical care plans tailored specifically to a child’s specific characteristics like age and medical history to provide more accurate and effective care. For example, AI can help determine the optimal dose of a certain drug according to a child’s weight, predict the response to a particular drug treatment, and identify children at increased risk of an adverse drug reaction.⁴ ​

Virtual health assistants  

Chatbots and virtual assistants are becoming more popular in paediatric care, providing optimal support for families, particularly in areas with limited access to healthcare. Chatbots help guide parents to take the appropriate steps and remedies for many minor symptoms and ailments, answer their questions, monitor medication adherence, or offer remote doctor consultations.⁴ ​

AI in paediatric surgery  

AI-powered technologies hold great potential when it comes to surgical procedures. Numerous technologies are being increasingly tried in different areas of paediatric surgery, such as robotic-assisted surgical tools which offer guidance to the surgeon throughout the procedure by enhancing landmark visualisation or providing feedback on their performance, allowing for more precision and control and minimising complications. AI tools might also allow for a complete analysis of the surgical procedures and techniques performed at the operation and write comprehensive reports for documentation.⁵

Opportunities for AI in pediatric care

Improving access to care 

Telemedicine involves the use of technologies such as mobile phones, laptops, or other devices to remotely access medical care without needing to visit the clinic or hospital. AI algorithms can be used to offer virtual assistance and remote monitoring, making it easier to receive medical care in rural settings.⁴

Advancing research and development 

The huge amount of data AI can analyse, manipulate, and test, offers enormous potential in understanding paediatric diseases and developing new treatments by designing clinical trials and optimising drug discovery (the process through which potential new medicines are identified). Additionally, AI-powered language models like ChatGPT have provided valuable assistance for authors in the process of article writing and publication.^2,6 ​

Education and training 

Medical education is also benefitting from AI applications. Virtual reality (VR) tools and AI simulations may present a near-realistic training opportunity for medical students and trainee doctors to practice procedures or exercise decision-making in a risk-free environment to improve their skills.⁷ ​

Challenges and ethical considerations 

Data privacy and security 

AI tools deal with sensitive health data, particularly when it is usually not feasible to obtain consent from a child, thereby raising security concerns. Both doctors and providers of AI tools must ensure that patient data is safe and protected.⁸ ​

Bias and fairness 

AI is capable of analysing, interpreting, and generating results based only on the data on which it has been trained. For this reason, this data must be sufficiently diverse to represent the population. For example, how a disease presents itself may vary according to ethnicity. As such, if an AI model designed to recognise features of a disease is trained on only one ethnic group, it may negatively impact the accuracy of the results, leading to a missed diagnosis or an incorrect diagnosis. This can be particularly challenging in rare diseases with limited data.⁸ ​​ 

Parental acceptance 

Even if AI tools are flawless, parents and caregivers may still have concerns about their children’s safety, the tool’s accuracy, or its cost. Healthcare providers must therefore ensure to convey information effectively when outlining the pros and cons so as to build trust and offer informed choices for the family.⁹ ​

Future outlook 

Emerging trends in AI for pediatric care 

AI is continuously evolving and has the potential to transform future paediatric care. Current trends include its applications across the various subspecialties of paediatrics like mental and behavioural health, cancer diagnosis, robotic surgery, and drug discovery (the process of identifying molecules that could potentially treat disease).⁸ ​

Collaborative efforts 

Multidisciplinary collaboration between technology companies, healthcare providers, and stakeholders – both locally and globally – is essential for the continued advancement in paediatrics and child health. This collaboration aids in addressing the gaps, identifying the barriers, and assessing the progress to be able to provide tools that are both efficient and ethical.⁹ ​  

Summary  

Paediatrics is promised tremendous opportunities by the advancement of one of the greatest achievements of human innovations – artificial intelligence (AI). These opportunities include the potential for more precise and accurate diagnostic tools, the creation of personalised treatment plans, robotic surgery and virtual assistance. However, with these opportunities come significant challenges, such as data privacy concerns and the introduction of bias and inequality. Judicious integration of AI output guided by the informed policies of multidisciplinary efforts can leverage AI's full potential to provide future generations with better paediatric healthcare.