Artificial intelligence in healthcare and medicine: clinical applications, therapeutic advances, and future perspectives

Abstract

Healthcare systems worldwide face growing challenges, including rising costs, workforce shortages, and disparities in access and quality, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative tool capable of addressing these issues by enhancing diagnostics, treatment planning, patient monitoring, and healthcare efficiency. AI's role in modern medicine spans disease detection, personalized care, drug discovery, predictive analytics, telemedicine, and wearable health technologies. Leveraging machine learning and deep learning, AI can analyze complex data sets, including electronic health records, medical imaging, and genomic profiles, to identify patterns, predict disease progression, and recommend optimized treatment strategies. AI also has the potential to promote equity by enabling cost-effective, resource-efficient solutions in low-resource and remote settings, such as mobile diagnostics, wearable biosensors, and lightweight algorithms. Successful deployment requires addressing critical challenges, including data privacy, algorithmic bias, model interpretability, regulatory oversight, and maintaining human clinical oversight. Emphasizing scalable, ethical, and evidence-driven implementation, key strategies include clinician training in AI literacy, adoption of resource efficient tools, global collaboration, and robust regulatory frameworks to ensure transparency, safety, and accountability. By complementing rather than replacing healthcare professionals, AI can reduce errors, optimize resources, improve patient outcomes, and expand access to quality care. This review emphasizes the responsible integration of AI as a powerful catalyst for innovation, sustainability, and equity in healthcare delivery worldwide.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence; Diagnostics; Ethical challenges; Healthcare systems; Personalized medicine.

Fig. 1

History of artificial intelligence in healthcare

Fig. 2

AI in acquiring and analyzing data of a patient in personalizing the treatment [34]

Fig. 3

Process of drug discovery with the help of AI [11]

Fig. 4

Clinical applications of AI for colorectal cancer (CRC) [93]

Fig. 5

General workflow of AI-based pathology for response prediction in breast cancer: (A) digital transformation and preliminary image processing of pathological images; (B) marking, extraction, and selection of input image features; (C) model construction and validation; (D) pCR prediction and exploration of outputs [104]

Fig. 6

AI-based technologies in lung cancer immunotherapy [112]