“Carried out in a responsible manner, autonomous artificial intelligence has the promise of lowering cost and increasing accessibility and quality in health care,” IDx founder and CEO, Michael Abramoff, MD, PhD, said at an FTC hearing on ethical and consumer protection issues related to new AI applications.

Abramoff was invited to lend his expertise as a practicing physician and founder of IDx, which received FDA clearance for an autonomous AI diagnostic system.

He spoke during a section of the hearing entitled, “Understanding Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, and Predictive Analytics Through Real-World Applications.”

When asked about what circumstances permit the use of AI technologies over traditional algorithms and vice versa, Abramoff said AI is highly dependent on the intended use and deployment conditions.

“For specific types of medical applications, AI technology achieves higher performance on cognitively complex tasks than most humans, and there are many algorithmic approaches, including deep learning, that AI can be built with,” according Abramoff in the hearing transcript. “AI technologies can improve accuracy and performance over traditional hard-coded algorithms and perform better on highly complex optimization problems.”

He added that when selecting AI technology, “one must concurrently assess practical, policy and ethical issues in addition to technical and use case considerations.”