Welcome to the New Era of AI Medicine

By David Galland. He is with The Rational Optimist Society. Excerpts:

"For three years, Courtney Hofmann’s young son Alex suffered pains no one could explain.

He chewed on things to cope with headaches. His gait changed, and he stopped growing. By the time he turned seven, he had been seen by 17 doctors and specialists, including pediatricians, neurologists, orthopedists, ENTs, and even dentists.

Every doctor followed the established protocols, ordering exams to test their latest theories, but ultimately none came up with a helpful diagnosis.

Finally, in desperation, Courtney pasted her son’s medical records into ChatGPT and asked for an opinion.

After engaging in a collaborative exchange about her son’s symptoms, ChatGPT came back with tethered cord syndrome, a rare condition in which the spinal cord is abnormally anchored to the surrounding tissue instead of floating freely. As Alex grew and his spine lengthened normally, the tethered cord was increasingly stretched.

ChatGPT results in hand, Courtney found a neurosurgeon who specialized in the condition. He confirmed the diagnosis, and Alex had the necessary surgery. Today, he’s fine.

And so we find ourselves on the cusp of a new era of medicine and healthcare where, for the price of a modest monthly subscription, a chatbot working from the same records as 17 medical professionals correctly diagnosed a complicated medical problem the experts had all missed.

In this Deep Dive, we’ll look at the astonishing progress AI is enabling across the very foundations of medicine, including disease diagnosis, drug development, and treatment.

As you’ll read, AI is almost certainly the most important development in human health since antibiotics.

And it’s happening right now, as you read this, which means we’ll be the beneficiaries of this healthcare revolution."

The current AI-driven progress in radically improved diagnosis and healthcare is the result of three fairly obvious developments unfolding at the same time:

Data digitization – Though privacy rules and fragmented systems still create roadblocks, today nearly all medical records and associated images have been digitized, creating a pool of trillions of data points available for analysis and, importantly, training AI.

Foundation Models – A single large model can now process text, images, genomes, and waveforms—such as those produced by an ECG—all at once. The latest AI models can read your medical history, review your charts, study your scans, and weigh your genetics, processing every input together in an analysis that happens in the blink of a proverbial eye.

Compute – The AIs powering today’s medical breakthroughs run on a level of computation that would have been prohibitively expensive—and perhaps impossible—just 15 years ago.

Put those three developments together, and you get . . . a near-superhuman diagnostician that can weigh your personal health data against a vast library of peer-reviewed research, massive clinical databases, and archives of medical images tied to known outcomes—and apply all of it in seconds."

"The first randomized controlled trial of AI in cancer screening involved nearly 106,000 women in Sweden. During the trial, radiologists, supported by an AI system called Transpara, detected 29% more breast cancers than using standard practices, with no increase in false positives.

Importantly, those results were produced while cutting screen-reading workload by 44%!"

"An observational study in Germany involving the routine screening of nearly half a million women found that radiologists using AI caught 17.6% more breast cancers than those not using it."