Zeljko Kraljevic
outlines how these foundation models for medicine can provide the potential for a diverse integration of medical data that includes electronic health records, images, lab values, biologic layers such as the genome and gut microbiome…

Over the past four years, the AI world has surged ahead with large language models (LLMs), also known as “foundation models” which can be adapted to achieve many linguistic tasks. You’ve probably seen a plethora of articles in the media recently about some of these models (ChatGPT, Dalle-2), that can write coherent essays, write code, but also generate art and films, and many other capabilities. 

With the NHS at breaking point, a critical question is whether these AI approaches could be used to improve care. Hospital records hold detailed information about each patient’s health status and general clinical history, a large portion of which is stored within the unstructured text. Temporal modelling of this medical history, which considers the sequence of events, could be used to forecast and simulate future events, estimate risk, suggest alternative diagnoses or forecast complications. 

I have developed
Foresight

as part of the
CogStack
platform, a novel GPT-based pipeline that is trained on NHS data to forecast future medical events such as disorders, medications, symptoms and interventions.

On tests in two large King’s Health Partner hospitals (King’s College Hospital, South London and Maudsley) and the US MIMIC-III dataset Foresight performed well when set challenges by clinicians. The model is being used for many uses including real-world risk estimation, virtual clinical trials and clinical research to study the progression of diseases, simulate interventions and counterfactuals, and for educational purposes.

Preprint:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08072
Video:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6i7faJV-hg4
App:
https://foresight.sites.er.kcl.ac.uk

 Medical AIs are advancing – when will they be in a clinic near you? 
Read the  New Scientist article