Legal and ethical reflections on the use of artificial intelligence in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer: who assumes responsibility?

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers multiple advantages, such as: improvement and accuracy of the diagnosis, decrease of the doctors' workload, decrease of the hospitalization costs, and becoming increasingly widespread, studied, and applied in medicine. AI is already used in image recognition, has haptic perception, and can manipulate instruments. Thus, surgical robots will likely be driven by AI. In the near future, machine learning (ML) will also appear. The use of AI and the study of the specialty literature raise ethical and legal questions for which there is no unanimous answer yet. Medical liability (malpractice) for AI-related errors and damages to the patient prompts legal reflections on this topic. The diagnostic algorithms of AI raise questions regarding the risks of using AI in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer (especially in rare cases), the information provided to the patient, all of these having moral and legal implications, as well as regarding the impact on the empathic doctor-patient relationship. Actually, the use of AI in the medical field has triggered a revolution in the doctor-patient relationship, but it has possible medico-legal consequences as well. The current legal framework regulating medical liability when AI is applied is inadequate and requires urgent measures, because there is no specific and uniform legislation to regulate the liability of the various parties involved in applying AI, or that of the end-users. Consequently, greater attention should be paid to the risk of applying AI, to the necessity to regulate its safe use, and to maintain the safety standards of the patient by continuously adapting and updating the system.