this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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[–] utopiah@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

There are pretty great applications in medicine.

Like what? I discussed just 2 days ago with a friend who works in public healthcare, who is bullish about AI and best he could come up with DeepMind AlphaFold which is yes interesting, even important, and yet in a way "good old fashion AI" as has been the case for the last half century or so, namely a team of dedicated researchers, actual humans, focusing on a hard problem, throwing state of the art algorithms at a problem and some compute resources... but AFAICT there is so significant medicine research that made a significant change through "modern" AI like LLMs.

[–] Dicska@lemmy.world 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

The first thing that comes to my mind is cancer screening. I had to look it up because I can't always trust my memory, and I thought there was some AI involved in the RNA sequencing research for the Covid vaccine, but I actually remembered wrong.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Skimmed through the article and I found it surprisingly difficult to pinpoint what "AI" solution they actually covered, despite going as far as opening the supplementary data of the research they mentioned. Maybe I'm missing something obvious so please do share.

AFAICT they are talking about using computer vision techniques to highlight potential problems in addition to bringing the non annotated image.

This... is great! But I'd argue this is NOT what "AI" at the moment is hyped about. What I mean is that computer vision and statistics have been used, in medicine and elsewhere, with great success and I don't see why it wouldn't be applied. Rather I would argue the hype at he moment in AI is about LLM and generative AI. AFAICT (but again had a hard time parsing through this paper to get anything actually specific) none of that is using it.

FWIW I did specific in my post tht my criticism was about "modern" AI, not AI as a field in general.

[–] gmtom@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

I'm not at that exact company, but a very similar one.

It's AI because we essentially we just take early scans from people who are later diagnosed with respiratory illnesses and using that to train a neural network to recognise early signs that a human doctor wouldn't notice.

The actual algorithm we started with and built upon is basically identical to one of the algoriths used in a generative AI models (the one that takes an image, does some maths wizardry on it and tells you how close the image is to the selected prompt). Of course we heavily modify it for our needs so it's pretty different in the end product, and we're not using its output to feedback into a denoiser and we have a lot of cognitive layers and some other tricks to bring the reliability up to a point we can actually use it denoise, but it's still at its core the same algorithm.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

Thanks, any publication please to better understand how it work?

[–] Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

What I heard so far was about advanced pattern recognition for scans (MRI, CT etc) to reduce oversights and in documents to detect potential patterns relevant for epidemologists (a use that's very controversial since it requires all medical documents of citizens to be centralized and available unencrypted). Also some scientists seem to praise purpose-built machine learning technology for specialised tasks (those are not LLMs though).

[–] gmtom@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Yeah that's what I do for work, it can detect respiratory diseases or even tumours from scans long before even the best human doctor could do reliably, and our work has already saved hundreds of lives and we're still only just rolling it out. It's legitimately going to revolutionise medicine.

[–] Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Awesome, truly love to hear that. 🥰

Question out of curiosity, even though that isn't exactly what you're working on: Do you think the technology could eventually also be used to detect what might be referred to as "latent cancer cells", that can't be destroyed by the body but also didn't grow into tumors yet due to the body fighting it?

Asking because that's what happened to me years ago. Had high inflammatory markers for over 1.5 years with no doctors being able to tell what the heck was going on. Then one day an angry Lymphoma appeared that required 4 aggressive chemo cycles and 14 day radio to get rid off, even though it was stage 1. If AI tech could be able to detect those "latent cancer cells" (or some biomarkers caused by them) before tumors appear… that would be phenomenally awesome.

[–] gmtom@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago

Honestly have no idea, I'm on the programming side, so don't really have much medical knowledge, but if I remember ill ask someone when I'm in the office on Wednesday.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 6 points 1 day ago

AI as in "Artificial Intelligence" has existed for decades and is quite useful - and specialized uses of LLMs can extend that. Although AI the buzzword for "generative intelligence" is new, and often wrong, being built to give the form of an answer rather than the reality of one.