ERS Congress 2024: Balancing Humans and Machines in Respiratory Medicine

The European Respiratory Society (ERS) Congress 2024 will address various aspects of applying artificial intelligence into respiratory medicine, and there will be many exciting presentations on this topic for attendees, says Martin Kolb, MD, PhD, professor of medicine at McMaster University.

This transcript was lightly edited.

Transcript

What are you most excited for at this year's ERS Congress?

The ERS Congress is one of the largest, if not the largest, international gatherings of respiratory experts, and it is in Vienna this time. It will cater to a very broad audience, from industry and academia, [as well as] learners and teachers. It’s a prime gathering.

There are a number of very important and hopefully informative sessions on clinical trials, and why some of the recent clinical trials have failed. There are topics on pollution, environmental, and occupational exposures for people who develop idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which may make this disease less idiopathic. There will be sessions focused on the relationship between exposures and interstitial lung disease. Of course, a big topic at the ERS Congress is artificial intelligence.

As many of you will know, artificial intelligence is something that you read [about] everywhere nowadays, in every aspect of life, and it's entering respiratory medicine too. I still don't know how to take artificial intelligence and how to apply it to practice. It certainly is a wonderful research tool and will probably be important for guidelines going forward and making prognostic statements about diseases or a cohort of disease patients.

I don't see yet much [of a] role for an individual. I don't think it's something that will enter the true clinical practice other than indirectly, through big picture statements. But it's a big topic, so it will be shown and showcased in interstitial lung disease, infectious disease, and in other disease areas. So, those are all things that are certainly exciting.