Dr Debra Boyer Previews ATS 2024 International Conference

This year's American Thoracic Society (ATS) International Conference kicks off in San Diego, California, this week. Running from May 17-22, the meeting will showcase the most recent research advances in clinical, basic, and translational science in pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine.

Debra Boyer, MD, MHPE, ATSF, a pediatric pulmonologist with a specialty in lung transplantations and chair of the ATS International Conference Committee, will introduce this year's first keynote session, "Artificial Intelligence in Medicine." In this interview, Boyer discussed the focuses of this year's keynote series, the conference's expert presenters, and what attendees can expect to take away from the meeting.

Transcript:

What sessions or specific topics are you looking forward to being discussed at ATS?

We have a bunch of different topics that are going to be discussed that I think will be of interest. We have 3 keynotes that I think are going to be highlights of the conference. One will be the use of AI in medicine; the second will be celebrating the 70th anniversary of the first ICU that was developed in Denmark in response to the polio pandemic. The author of a book [The Autumn Ghost: How the Battle Against a Polio Epidemic Revolutionized Modern Medical Care], Hannah Wunsch, MD, MSc, is going to talk about that story, which is really going to be interesting.

Then the last one is a super exciting panel on immigrant health care. We have 3 different individuals from across the country, ranging from a DACA recipient, who herself is now an emergency medicine resident in training, to folks that do work in environmental health for immigrants [Denisse Rojas Marquez, MD], as well as a pediatrician who advocates for health care for children who are immigrants to the US [Julie M. Linton, MD]. Those are going to be really exciting keynotes that I hope people will be able to attend.

What do you hope attendees take away from the conference and the session you are presenting on?

The AI session is our first keynote presentation and really our goals with that session are to give folks a sense of how to think about the use of artificial intelligence in medicine and in health care, both the positives and also potential risks and biases that may be associated with it.

The session is going to be moderated by Michael Howell, the chief clinical officer at Google, who has a lot of expertise in this area. Then we have 2 amazing speakers, [Fatima Rodriguez, MD, MPH] and [Matt DeCamp, MD, PhD] who are each going to discuss their individual usages of AI. Again, the positive things that it can do for us as physicians and researchers, but also just to put it in perspective of how we can use it safely and acknowledge its limitations.