Artificial intelligence for support of the bioethical decision-making of nurses related to end of life issues

Health professionals, especially nurses, are often compelled to make decisions in face of bioethical issues commonly related to intensive care environments. Due to their complexities and particularities, these issues end up generating great physical and emotional strain on the professional. Therefore, this study raised the hypothesis that artificial intelligence techniques could assist nurses in making bioethical decisions. For this, a group of four specialists in the field of nursing prepared and answered a questionnaire based on a hypothetical ICU scenario. The data collected from the responses were then used in the training and evaluation of five machine learning (ML) algorithms. The results culminated from a comparative study between the algorithms point to the veracity of the hypothesis raised in this research, by showing that it is possible to adopt ML algorithms to support bioethical decision making.