AI in healthcare: Google introduces MedML

The use of artificial intelligence in healthcare promises to relieve the burden on medical staff and improve the diagnosis of diseases. Following earlier research work on AI language models Med-PaLM and Med-PaLM 2 for medical applications in 2022 and 2023, Google is now presenting the commercial MedLM AI language model.

MedML is available in two versions in the USA and is based on Med-PaLM 2, which, according to Google studies, roughly corresponds to the level of knowledge of a medical specialist (e.g. oncologist, orthopedist). "The first MedLM model is larger, designed for complex tasks. The second is a medium model, able to be fine-tuned and best for scaling across tasks," explains Google in its cloud blog.

Two MedLM models for different use cases

For example, one model might log patient conversation summaries, while the other might be better suited to medication searches. In the next few months, Google's new AI model, Gemini, will also be integrated into the MedLM suite to enable an even broader range of applications

Several large companies in the medical industry have already been utilitzing Google's new medical AI in advance. This way, MedLM was able to expand the Augmedix app in order to automatically generate reports from recorded doctor-patient conversations. The AI BenchSci was also optimized with the help of MedLM to accelerate the research and development of medicines. This enables researchers to automatically create knowledge diagrams from over 100 million experiments.