The Future Circle of Healthcare: Ai, 3D Printing, Longevity, Ethics, and Uncertainty Mitigation

The past decade has brought to the fore the critical need to constantly envision and consider various scenarios where ongoing trends and sudden changes could together alter the provision of healthcare and the direction of medical research. This book brings together scholars whose areas of expertise represent different themes that are essential to understanding how healthcare might change and evolve over the next decade. What lessons can one take away from current and past developments? The themes explored by the book rest on four pillars. The first is the rapid pace and ubiquity of technological advances in areas such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, additive manufacturing and wearable electronics. The second pillar concerns healthy aging, longevity and the management of chronic diseases. The third is the imperative to remain cognizant of the ethical dimensions of medical decisions, adapting bioethics to ongoing changes in healthcare provision. Finally, the fourth pillar relates to how uncertainty in different domains of medical knowledge can be mitigated and translated into clinical practice. For example, how should uncertainty with the results of clinical trials for a new treatment be dealt with? What cost-benefit analyses would be most appropriate for the situation? Chapter authors identify respective challenges and promising opportunities, discussing how these could contribute to envisioning the future scope of healthcare when it comes to providing medical, economic and ethical values to human societies.

Chapters 1, 4, 12, and 20 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Sepehr Ehsani studied laboratory medicine and pathobiology at the University of Toronto at the BSc and PhD levels. While completing his undergraduate degree, he was part of a neuropathology research group. During his postgraduate study, he worked in a protein biology lab with a focus on the prion protein implicated in a number of neurodegenerative diseases. Ehsani was a postdoctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the MIT Computer Science and AI Lab, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 2013 to 2016. There, he worked mainly on the alpha-synuclein protein - another neurodegenerative disease-linked protein. In 2015 and 2016, he was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard College’s Program in General Education. He has been studying analytic philosophy at University College London since 2017 and is researching the augmentation of mechanistic explanations of disease with ceteris paribus laws and cell biological principles.

Patrick Glauner is a Full Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Deggendorf Institute of Technology in Bavaria, Germany, a position he is honored to hold since the age of 30. In parallel, he is the Founder & CEO of skyrocket.ai GmbH, an AI consulting firm. As an expert witness, he advised the German federal parliament and the French National Assembly on AI. He regularly advises various federal and state ministries in Germany. He has published four books: Creating Innovation Spaces (Springer, 2021), Digitalisierungskompetenzen: Rolle der Hochschulen (Hanser, 2021), Digitalization in Healthcare (Springer, 2021), and Innovative Technologies for Market Leadership (Springer, 2020). His works on AI were featured by New Scientist, McKinsey, Imperial College London, Times Higher Education, Coursera, Udacity, the Luxembourg National Research Fund, Towards Data Science, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Wehrtechnik, and others. Previously, he held managerial positions at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, at Krones Group, and at Alexander Thamm GmbH. He graduated as valedictorian from Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences with a BSc in Computer Science. He subsequently received an MSc in Machine Learning from Imperial College London, an MBA from Quantic School of Business and Technology, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Luxembourg. He is an alumnus of the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes).

Philipp Plugmann has been doing multidisciplinary work for the last 20 years in parallel to practicing as a dentist in his own clinic in Leverkusen, Germany. He is also full Professor of Interdisciplinary Periodontology and Prevention at SRH University of Applied Health Sciences. His first book on innovation in medical technology, published in 2011, was reviewed by Cisco. His second book on innovation, published with Springer in 2018, had more than 100,000 chapter downloads during the first thirty months after its release. Previously, he held multiple adjunct faculty appointments for over fifteen years, winning multiple teaching awards. He also holds an MBA in Health Care Management, an MSc in Business Innovation (both from the EBS University of Business and Law, Germany), and an MSc in Periodontology and Implant Therapy (DGParo, German Society for Periodontology); he is currently pursuing his third doctorate. Prof. Plugmann has given research talks in the field of innovation at conferences at Harvard Business School (USA), Berkeley Haas School of Business (USA), Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition (Germany), Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy (Germany) and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). He is a serial entrepreneur and advisor to several companies, including a global technology consultancy as a Senior Advisor for Life Science and Health Care. Since 2020, he is a reviewer for the Federal Health Bulletin (Bundesgesundheitsblatt).

Florian M. Thieringer studied medicine at the TU Munich, dentistry at the LMU Munich, and health business administration at the FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg. He is an oral- and cranio-maxillofacial surgeon as well as a medical 3D expert with a focus on tumor, trauma, reconstructive and orthognathic surgery. Located at the University Hospital Basel and University of Basel, Switzerland, FMT is currently senior surgeon and Privatdozent for oral and cranio-maxillofacial surgery. He is also Head of the Medical Additive Manufacturing Research Group at the University of Basel’s Department of Biomedical Engineering. He has earned international recognition for his expertise in computer assisted surgery and medical additive manufacturing, extensively exploring and promoting the integration of virtual surgical planning, 3D printing and other innovative technologies at the point-of-care (such as additive manufacturing of patient specific implants in various biomaterials, including bioprinting and regenerative surgery). Since 2016, he has acted as Co-Director of the multidisciplinary 3D Print Lab at the University Hospital of Basel. Since 2020, he has been Co-Principal Investigator of the innovative MIRACLE 2 project (Minimally Invasive Robot-Assisted Computer-guided LaserosteotomE). Funded by the Werner Siemens Foundation, the 12m Swiss Franc research project aims to develop a robotic endoscope to perform contact-free bone surgery with laser light. Perfectly fitting patient-specific implants will be designed in AR/VR for production through intra- and extra-corporeal 3D printing.