Awareness and application of artificial intelligence (AI) by consultant doctors to enhanced tertiary health care service delivery at the Federal Teaching Hospital, Gombe, Nigeria

This study examined the awareness and application of artificial intelligence (AI) by consultant Doctors to enhanced tertiary health care service delivery at the Federal Teaching Hospital, Gombe, Nigeria. The study adopted a quantitative research methodology using a descriptive survey design. The population of the study consists of 120 consultant’s doctors working under the study area. Consensus sampling technique was adopted for the study that is the entire population of 120 consultant doctors was used as a population for the study, and data were collected using structured questionnaires and checklists. Mean and standard deviation were used as the method of data collection. The findings revealed a moderate overall awareness of AI tools, with only Google’s DeepMind Health reaching a high awareness level (Mean = 3.05). Similarly, the application of AI tools in healthcare service delivery was generally high (Grand Mean = 2.86). The study also found that the application of specific AI techniques including deep learning (CNNs), support vector machines (SVM), and natural language processing (NLP) was moderate, reflecting ongoing but incomplete integration into clinical workflows. Regarding use cases, AI was moderately applied across various clinical tasks such as radiomics, predicting chronic diseases, patient record summarization, and surgical assistance, with radiomics recording the highest mean score (Mean = 2.84). The study recommended among others that management of teaching hospitals should increase training for healthcare professionals, investment in digital health infrastructure, and the formulation of policies to guide ethical and effective AI deployment.