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If the current Google trial goes well, your next hospital visit could include a little help from artificial intelligence (AI). According to recent reports, Google has been using its Med-PaLM-2 chatbot at the Mayo Clinic since April.
In a recent paper detailing work with the new AI, Google said its MED-PALM-2 chatbot has the ability to answer health questions and offer diagnoses based on symptoms. But the program can also perform laborious tasks, such as summarizing a medical document or organizing patient data. In the future, Google hopes AI can aid in the analysis of X-rays as well.
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The chatbot is based on the company’s MED-PALM-2 language model, which was announced a few months back. Med-PALM 2 includes not only general language training, but also training by experts on medical demonstrations and medical-licensing exam questions and answers. This training makes the chatbot much better at health-related conversations than regular chatbots, Google said.
Interestingly, Google said that Med-PaLM-2 showed correct understanding of the situation in almost every metric. According to its analysis, the chatbot performed just as well as a real person. In fact, the company said that the AI sometimes generates responses that are prioritized over those of actual physicians.
Of course, it’s not perfect. Speaking at MED-PALM-2 earlier this year, Google said the chatbot still suffers from the accuracy issues that plague all similar products. However, for the most part, those inaccuracies were in the form of irrelevant answers.
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Speaking about the company’s AI, a senior research director at Google said Med-PaLM-2 is still in the early stages of development, and won’t necessarily incorporate it into its “healthcare journey”. But he also said that language models take AI applications in the medical world and “expand them 10-fold”.
Naturally, this use of AI in healthcare raises some privacy concerns. But Google said users’ health data would be encrypted and used locally exclusively by Med-PaLM-2. Google as a corporation would have no access to that information.
