The Med-PaLM-2 chatbot has been designed to answer medical questions and suggest a diagnosis based on various symptoms. — AFP Relaxnews
Google is currently trialing an AI chatbot specialised in medical diagnosis in several American clinics. The aim is to quickly guide patients and answer questions about their symptoms. The technology in no way replaces doctors, but it can assist them in establishing a diagnosis.
Artificial intelligence continues to make inroads into the medical world, as demonstrated by an experiment conducted by Google at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. The Med-PaLM-2 chatbot has been designed to answer medical questions and suggest a diagnosis based on various symptoms. In addition, the AI chatbot can perform more administrative tasks, such as organizing data or summarizing a patient's medical file. The study of X-rays is already stated as a future goal.
This specialist chatbot is based on a linguistic model fed with medical documentation and a series of questions/answers derived from medical examinations. This makes it a far more effective and reliable tool in the medical field than a less specialist AI such as ChatGPT.
While a chatbot is obviously no substitute for a real doctor, it can nevertheless provide patients with information and direct them to a specific service. It can also speed up diagnosis by directly assisting the doctor during a consultation.
Currently, Med-PaLM-2 is still in the development stage and is only being used to a limited extent in this trial setting. With regard to medical confidentiality and health data shared by users, Google explains that all these interactions are encrypted and only used locally, which means that at no time does the company have access to this confidential information.
Note that the Mayo Clinic is also experimenting, again with Google, with an AI-automated head and neck radiotherapy management model. Here, an algorithm seeks to reduce the time needed to plan treatment for cancers localized to the head and neck. The aim is to optimise sessions for the well-being and successful treatment of patients.
To achieve this, the artificial intelligence model has been trained on several hundred cases from Mayo Clinic patients with this type of cancer who have already received treatment.
While artificial intelligence is often a source of fear and anxiety, it is also the subject of great hope when it comes to healthcare. – AFP Relaxnews
