Healthcare AI News 4/26/23

News

Apple is developing a paid, AI-powered health coaching service called Quartz that uses the Apple Watch to encourage healthy behaviors. The company will also release a dedicated version of its Health app for the IPad.

Google merges its DeepMind and Brain team from Google Research into a single unit called Google DeepMind, which the company says will accelerate its progress in using AI to solve humanity’s biggest challenges.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai says in the company’s earnings call that Google is investing heavily in AI, but downplays the potentially negative effect that it will have on search advertising. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says in his company’s earnings call that Bing has gained market share following early incorporation of AI in its search, and calls AI’s impact “a generational shift in the largest software category – search.”

OpenAI adds the ability for ChatGPT users to turn off chat history to avoid having their conversations used for model training.

Life sciences technology vendor Trinity Life Sciences offers its customers AI-driven insights powered by WhizAI. The conversational AI and visualization platform will provide analytics for Trinity’s enterprise reporting platform, allowing users to type or ask business questions to generate visualizations and dashboards.

PricewaterhouseCoopers will spend $1 billion over the next three years to automate parts of its tax, audit, and consulting services using ChatGPT and Microsoft Azure.

3M Health Information Systems will use AWS services, including machine learning and generative AI, to further enhance its clinical documentation and virtual assistant solutions that include ambient intelligence.

NIH awards Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals a $6.2 million grant to study the use of AI to predict cardiovascular disease from the calcium scoring of CT images.

Unfold AI, an FDA-cleared prostate cancer management platform from Avenda Health, is being used in an unnamed US research hospital to offer treatment selection, planning, guidance, and follow-up.

Federal regulators will enforce existing civil rights laws when generative AI tools perform “digital redlining” in introducing bias into decisions about hiring, credit, and housing. EEOC Chair Charlotte Burrows says that rapid AI development is a “new civil rights frontier.”

Research

An analysis of the use of AI-powered conversational assistants for support inquiries shows a 14% increase in the number of issues resolved per hour, mostly improving the performance of inexperienced workers who are supported by the stored knowledge of their more experienced peers.

Opinion

The Verge notes the legal situation created by a viral song hit that was created using AI, prompting Drake’s record label to warn that training AI using the music of its artists is a breach of copyright laws. Skeptics question whether it was actually a record label PR stunt. The legal issue is that Google-owned YouTube pulled the track due to a take-down notice from the record label, but the record label doesn’t own the song, which then pits Google’s AI-enriched search against YouTube’s music partners about what constitutes fair use.

A HIMSS23 panel warns health systems that hackers will be launching AI-powered cyberattacks, predicting the rise in AI-operated ransomware and ChatGPT-crafted phishing emails that sound more authentic, but with security technology vendors also using the technology to build smarter defenses.

Other

Pharma bro and ex-con Martin Shkreli rolls out a medical chatbot called Dr. Gupta that he says will be a “replacement for all healthcare information” that will leave WebMD “dead in the water.” He says the new large language model was trained in data from the web and from online medical journals, using both GPT 3.5 and GPT-4 to improve performance with some sacrifice in response speed. Users can ask five questions for free, then sign up for a $20 per month subscription to Dr. Gupta. When asked about HIPAA concerns related to users submitting PHI to an online chatbot, Shkreli suggested on Twitter to read the terms to decide whether to use it. Meanwhile, Twitter has suspended Shkreli’s account, although his original post on Substack remains, where he argues that healthcare is expensive because of the artificially constrained supply of healthcare professionals. Shkreli also wrote a 200-page novel using ChatGPT. 

A Washington Post study of the 15 million websites on which Google trains its C4 data set places HIStalk at #1,996, representing 3.4 million of the data set’s tokens.

Resources and Tools

• DocLime – allows analyzing documents stored in PDF form to generate summaries, answer questions, or provide research citations.
• Zain Kahn, “The AI Guy,” lists ways to prompt ChatGPT for learning. Examples: “”Proofread my writing above. Fix grammar and spelling mistakes. And make suggestions that will improve the clarity of my writing” and “I want to learn about [insert topic]. Identify and share the most important 20% of learnings from this topic that will help me understand 80% of it.”

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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