Artificial Intelligence (AI) is bringing a great transformation in all spheres of life including healthcare sector. Recent work has proved that AI techniques have a great potential in making healthcare facilities affordable and easily accessible [1]. AI promises early diagnosis of diseases, improved patient care and facilitating continuous monitoring of patients. However, for an optimized use of AI for healthcare, doctors and AI experts need to collaborate. Thus, it is desirable that medical graduates have a good understanding of data science and AI techniques, they are going to need to handle it in the near future.

Researchers have developed powerful high-performance AI tools in healthcare to predict the occurrence of many chronic diseases like cancers, diabetes, etc. [2]. Many AI tools have already been approved by regulatory authorities to diagnose diseases, and are being used in primary healthcare centres of rural areas in developed countries like USA [3]. As the healthcare policy-makers are looking forward to amalgamating AI in healthcare sector, it is high time that medical education curriculum be updated to include formal education of emerging medical professionals in this technology. Introduction of AI in medical education curriculum has previously also been suggested [4]. Curriculum should be focussed on AI literacy rather than expertise. AI researchers/data scientists may act as resource persons to conduct faculty development programs in AI for medical faculty. The subject must be taught making sure that complex mathematics is avoided, and the concepts are explained in an easy way. For the medical students, emphasis should be laid on population health and evidence-based medicine. Clinicians should have a formal training of using AI tools to spot anomalies, forecast patterns from medical data and make decisions. Medical students may be provided with an opportunity to see and observe simple concepts of data mining working with small data science projects to enable them to use AI techniques to get meaningful information from data.

There is a pressing need to build an ecosystem where AI experts, data scientists and medical practitioners collaborate to ensure optimal utilization of AI in healthcare sector. For this to happen, it is desirable to orient medical student of today to AI to enable him to use the same tomorrow.

1. Ngiam KY, Khor IW. Big data and machine learning algorithms for health-care delivery. Lancet Oncol. 2019;20:e262-e273.

2. Karapinar Senturk Z. Early diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease using machine learning algorithms. Medical Hypotheses. 2020;138: 109603.

3. Van der Heijden A, Abramoff M, Verbraak F, et al. Validation of automated screening for referable diabetic retinopathy with the IDx-DR device in the Hoorn Diabetes Care System. Acta Ophthalmologica. 2017;96:63-8.

4. Rampton V, Mittelman M, Goldhahn J. Implications of artificial intelligence for medical education. Lancet Digital Health. 2020; 2:e111-e12.