Artificial intelligence in healthcare research and publication: Charting its ethical usage

The National Medical Council (NMC) recently issued guidelines to be followed by all registered medical professionals with the following objectives: To preserve the dignity of the medical profession, prevent commercialization, protect patient interest, and ensure that healthcare communication remains informational, ethical, and evidence-based.It also seeks to regulate advertisements and promotional communications that are disseminated through digital and emerging technologies and uphold patient autonomy and privacy.They have defined "artificial intelligence" or "AI" as a self-learning automated process, program, machine, or computer built for doing tasks that usually require the human brain.The guidelines specifically state that an artificial intelligence (AI)-generated promotional campaign should compulsorily carry the source mark, explicitly attribute the content to AI, and that the registered medical practitioner should not use AI generated or modified promotional content focusing on the diagnosis, treatment or patient clinical response.Further, sharing patient's experience on social media or on any other platform, is disallowed.In the same document, stress is laid on ensuring privacy, confidentiality, data protection, and professional ethics.[1] This document from the regulatory body is welcome as it addresses a very pertinent and current need to provide a template for the regulation of the ethical use of AI in healthcare.Toward this end, we at the Indian Journal of Skin Allergy wanted to come out with a symposium focusing on AI in healthcare research and publication.Providentially, these articles address some of the concerns highlighted by the NMC.The article by Sil and Das on the ethics of AI use in dermatology research and healthcare highlights the incorporation of AI in dermatology and eczema diagnosis, triage, and management by teledermatology and stresses that the rapid explosion of integration of AI in healthcare and research has not been supported by well-defined, ethical, and regulatory guidelines to prevent its misuse.