AI in Medicine: Companies and Stories to Watch
Compiled in July 2023 and written by Brent Skorup and Mayali Clary, Mercatus Center at GMU
Public policymakers and AI companies should prioritize AI research and commercialization where AI is likely to generate economic growth. One of the biggest expenses for American households—and one of the biggest U.S. industrial sectors—is healthcare and medicine. Below are some stories that caught our eye about companies making concrete improvements in AI use in healthcare and medicine.
BrainSightAI running clinical trials
BrainSightAI is an India-based startup that was founded in 2019. The company assists neuroscientists in better understanding brain scans, aids in pre-surgical planning, generates outputs like heat maps, z scores, and so much more. Currently, the company is running clinical trials in patients with possible Alzheimer’s disease, patients with brain tumors, brain trauma, and epilepsy.
From YourStory.com.
Caption Health, an AI ultrasound company, acquired by GE
GE recently acquired Caption Health, a medical tech startup based out of California and was founded in 2013. The company uses both artificial intelligence and ultrasound technology for early disease detection; their AI software helps doctors assess image quality and calculate ejection fraction. Caption Health’s technology has been commercially available for about three years.
From FierceBioTech.com.
AI uses in molecular biology
The Illumina AI laboratory introduced SpliceAI in 2019. The SpliceAI system doesn’t use transformer technology or function as an LLM; instead, it uses other types of language modeling, and the SpliceAI neural network is trained on DNA sequences. "To date, [SpliceAI] has solved hundreds of previously unresolved cases of rare undiagnosed pediatric disease . . . ."
From TowardDataScience.com.
Google and OpenAI testing AI chatbots for medical uses
Google is testing its Med-PaLM 2 AI chat technology, which is based on the company's PaLM 2 large language model and has been trained on medical licensing exam questions and expert demonstrations. The technology shows promise in answering health-related questions, summarizing documents, and organizing research data.
In April, Microsoft, the largest investor in OpenAI, teamed up with the health software company Epic to build tools that can automatically draft messages to patients using the algorithms behind ChatGPT.
“Both Google and Microsoft also have expressed interest in a bigger ambition: building a virtual assistant that answers medical questions from patients around the world, particularly in areas with limited resources, according to company documents.”
From WSJ.com.