Academic Considerations for Ensuring the Economic Feasibility of Medical AI Research
When people in academia talk about the development of medical AI, the discussion often drifts toward higher resolution, more accurate diagnosis, and fully automatic or end-to-end autonomous models. This tendency is understandable. Academic incentives reward measurable performance improvements, benchmark dominance, and methodological elegance. However, this perspective quietly overlooks the force that ultimately determines whether a technology survives outside the laboratory: economics. Healthcare systems do not evolve in ideal conditions. They evolve under demographic pressure, workforce shortages, rising capital and maintenance costs, and reimbursement systems that lag far behind technological ambition. Aging populations increase demand precisely when the number of available specialists declines. Clinics and community hospitals operate under tight financial margins, and patients do not conveniently behave like well-curated datasets. These realities do not wait for optimal technology. ...