Envisioning Possibilities and Challenges of AI for Personalized Cancer Care

TL;DR

This paper explores how AI can improve personalized cancer care for minority groups by addressing current gaps, while also highlighting ethical concerns and the need for systemic healthcare changes.

Contribution

It provides qualitative insights into the potential and challenges of AI-driven personalized cancer care for underserved populations.

Findings

AI can enable culturally and linguistically tailored interactions

Concerns about data privacy and loss of human touch

Need for systemic healthcare reforms beyond technology

Abstract

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare, including in caring for cancer survivors, has gained significant interest. However, gaps remain in our understanding of how such AI systems can provide care, especially for ethnic and racial minority groups who continue to face care disparities. Through interviews with six cancer survivors, we identify critical gaps in current healthcare systems such as a lack of personalized care and insufficient cultural and linguistic accommodation. AI, when applied to care, was seen as a way to address these issues by enabling real-time, culturally aligned, and linguistically appropriate interactions. We also uncovered concerns about the implications of AI-driven personalization, such as data privacy, loss of human touch in caregiving, and the risk of echo chambers that limit exposure to diverse information. We conclude by discussing the trade-offs between AI-enhanced personalization and the need for structural changes in healthcare that go beyond technological solutions, leading us to argue that we should begin by asking, ``Why personalization?''