Cognitive differences and ethical concerns in artificial intelligence in healthcare: a comparative text mining study...

This study aims to investigate the cognitive differences and ethical concerns regarding artificial intelligence in healthcare between the public and healthcare professionals and to provide empirical evidence for ethical governance and risk communication.

A text mining approach was adopted to comparatively analyze Chinese public social media and professional medical forums. A total of 4,042 valid texts were included, comprising 2,088 from the public corpus and 1,954 from the healthcare professional corpus. SnowNLP sentiment analysis, the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model, and co-word network analysis were applied to reconstruct and compare the structures of concern between the two groups.

Both groups were dominated by positive sentiment toward artificial intelligence in healthcare, although healthcare professionals showed a higher positive tendency (75.2%) than the public (68.0%), while the public exhibited a higher degree of caution. LDA topic analysis and co-word network analysis showed that both groups focused heavily on the role positioning and replacement boundaries of artificial intelligence. However, their specific focal concerns differed significantly. Healthcare professionals placed greater emphasis on occupational impact and practice-related concerns, mainly involving clinical application, responsibility, and humanistic care. In contrast, the public focused more on technical conditions and risk perception, emphasizing practical uses in healthcare settings, the reliability of data and models, and issues of responsibility and risk.

Although both the public and healthcare professionals hold relatively positive attitudes toward artificial intelligence in healthcare, their cognitive structures exhibit clear group differences. The subsequent ethical governance and advancement of artificial intelligence in healthcare require clarifying its functional boundaries while simultaneously addressing the practice-related concerns of healthcare professionals and the risk-related concerns of the public.