Google testing AI medical chatbot at Mayo Clinic

Google's AI tool, Med-PaLM 2, is designed to answer questions about medical information and is already being tested at hospitals like Mayo Clinic research hospital.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the chatbot is a variant of PaLM 2, which was announced at Google I/O in May this year. PaLM 2 is the language model supporting Google’s Bard. Google believes its model will be very helpful in countries with “more limited access to doctors.”

Med-PaLM 2 is trained on a curated set of medical expert demonstrations which will make the chatbot better at healthcare conversations. Google's publicised research regarding Med-PaLM 2 suffering from accuracy issues which most are used to in large language models.

The physicians in the research study found more inaccuracies and irrelevant information in answers provided by Google’s Med-PaLM and Med-PalM 2. In other metrics, Med-PaLM 2 did show performance as well as doctors.

The customers testing Med-PaLM 2 will control their data and Google won't have any access to it.

Google senior research director Greg Corrado told WSJ that Med-PaLM 2 was still in its early stages, and he wouldn't want it to be a part of his own family’s “healthcare journey", because it takes the places in healthcare where AI can be beneficial and expands them by 10-fold.”