Doctors have been using A.I. like ChatGPT for various tasks including doing tedious paperwork, predicting health problems, and even improving their bedside manner, but what about a large language model (LLM), trained on medical exams, that can help them with diagnoses? Google is hoping to take A.I. into the health care mainstream with a new, medicine-specific chatbot called Med-PaLM 2, that it’s been testing since April, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Med-PaLM 2 is an LLM that answers medical questions, organizes information, and can synthesize various modes of data including images and health records, according to Google’s website. Google, also the maker of the chatbot Bard, trained Med-PaLM 2 on medical licensing exams, and unsurprisingly it is the first A.I. to have produced passing answers for U.S. Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE)–style questions. Questions in the USMLE style present a patient scenario that lists symptoms, medical history, age, and other descriptors, and asks questions such as what complication is most likely. Med-PaLM 2 was able to provide long-form answers to these questions, in addition to selecting from multiple choices.
