Healthcare AI News 1/8/25

News

FDA issues draft guidance for supporting development and marketing of AI-enabled devices throughout the Total Product Life Cycle. It also publishes draft guidance for the use of AI to support development of drugs and biologicals.

Women’s health smart ring maker Movano announces EvieAI, a chatbot that was trained on peer-review medical journals. The company said in its CES announcement that the chatbot’s accuracy is 99%.

Law professors suggest that the Supreme Court’s recent overruling of the Chevron Doctrine — which allows federal agencies, rather than courts, to interpret and implement statutes when authorized by Congress — could impact the FDA’s ability to regulate AI, as its approach often relies on non-binding guidance documents and position papers.

Business

Hartford HealthCare implements Aidoc’s AI platform, which includes 17 FDA-cleared algorithms.

UK-based digital pathology vendor Deciphex raises $32 million in a Series C funding round.

Research

Researchers in China develop a health insurance fraud detection model for insurers and auditors.

A study finds that while AI is effective at making a diagnosis when fed exam-style questions, if fares worse when analyzing real-world conversations. The authors make these recommendations for AI developers:

• Train and test systems on conversational, open-ended questions as are found in unstructured doctor-patient conversations.
• Assess the model’s ability to ask the right questions.
• Design models to work across multiple conversations.
• Design models that can capture both textual data and images.
• Incorporate non-verbal cues such as facial expressions, voice tone, and body language.

Other

A health news site lists ways that North Carolina providers are using AI:

• Analyzing lung nodule scans to predict cancer risk (Atrium Health).
• Electronic follow-up with patients who have received a hip or knee replacement (OrthoCarolina).
• ED scanning of images to detect serious conditions (Novant Health).
• AI-drafted responses to patient portal messages (Atrium Health and WakeMed).
• Cognitive impairment detection (Wake Forest University School of Medicine).
• Flagging patients who are due a follow-up visit or imaging (Wake Forest Baptist).
• Early detection of sepsis (Duke Health, UNC Health).
• Suicide risk assessment (Novant Health).
• Optimizing OR use by predicting the length of surgical procedures (Duke Health).
• Answering provider administrative questions (UNC Health).

A popular TV journalist in Israel who lost his voice due to Lou Gehrig’s disease returns to Channel 12 by using AI that was trained on his voice to narrate his stories.

Health authorities in Sudan are hoping that AI can perform some of the work of doctors who have been killed in the country’s civil war.

A bioethicist warns that healthcare AI systems that allow customization could restrict exposure to important information in catering  to the user’s preferences and biases. She presents distinctions between systems that are customized for information discovery and those intended for information delivery.

Contacts

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