Introduction: Artificial intelligence (AI) holds the potential to revolutionize medicine, offering vast improvements for plastic surgery. While human physicians are limited to one lifetime of experience, AI is poised to soon surpass human capabilities, as it draws on limitless information and continuous learning abilities. Nevertheless, as AI becomes increasingly prevalent in this domain, it gives rise to critical ethical considerations that must be addressed by professionals.
Materials and methods: This work reviews the literature referring to the ethical challenges brought on by the ever-expanding use of AI in plastic surgery and offers guidelines for its application.
Results: Ethical challenges include the disclosure of use of AI by caregivers, validation of decision-making, data privacy, informed consent and autonomy, potential biases in AI systems, the opaque nature of AI models, questions of liability, and the need for regulations.
Conclusions: There is a lack of consensus for the ethical use of AI in plastic surgery. Guidelines, such as those presented in this work, are needed within each discipline of medicine to respond to important ethical considerations for the safe use of AI.
Level of evidence v: This journal requires that authors assign a level of evidence to each article. For a full description of these Evidence-Based Medicine ratings, please refer to the Table of Contents or the online Instructions to Authors www.springer.com/00266 .
Keywords: Artificial intelligence; Cosmetic surgery; Ethics; Plastic surgery.
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