Scientists train AI model to predict future illnesses

PARIS:

Scientists said Wednesday that they had created an AI model able to predict medical diagnoses years in advance, building on the same technology behind consumer chatbots like ChatGPT.

Based on a patient's case history, the Delphi-2M AI "predicts the rates of more than 1,000 diseases" years into the future, the team from British, Danish, German and Swiss institutions wrote in a paper published in the journal Nature.

Researchers trained the model on data from Britain's UK Biobank -- a large-scale biomedical research database with details on about half a million participants.

Neural networks based on so-called "transformer" architecture — the "T" in "ChatGPT" — most famously tackle language-based tasks, as in the chatbot and its many imitators and competitors.

But understanding a sequence of medical diagnoses is "a bit like learning the grammar in a text," German Cancer Research Center AI expert Moritz Gerstung told journalists.

Delphi-2M "learns the patterns in healthcare data, preceding diagnoses, in which combinations they occur and in which succession", he said, enabling "very meaningful and health-relevant predictions".

Gerstung presented charts suggesting the AI could single out people at far higher or lower risk of suffering a heart attack than their age and other factors would predict.

The team verified Delphi-2M's performance by testing it against data from almost two million people in Denmark's public health database.

But Gerstung and fellow team members stressed that the Delphi-2M tool needed further testing and was not yet ready for clinical use.