Healthcare is Lucrative, but so far, Big Tech has yet to benefit meaningfully from it. While each company has its unique advantages, we’re still so early in the field that any overarching view of the space will not be meaningful enough except to say, please expect lots of exciting innovation, and more than a few expensive failures.
AI is a focus area for everyone though its journey from Code to Clinic is an arduous one
We decided to look at the promising work by Big Tech in Healthcare and dedicate separate posts to them. This one is dedicated to one of Google’s most promising products- MedPaLM2!
How is it different from Med-PaLM 1?
It is more accurate. Med-PaLM was the first AI system to surpass the pass mark (>60%) in the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) style questions. Med-PaLM 2 was the first to reach human expert level on answering USMLE-style questions. It reached 86.5% accuracy on the MedQA medical exam benchmark in research.
Significantly, MedPaLM 2 is accurate not just in multiple choice answering, but also with long form answers.
Features
Med-PaLM 2 has a few defining features including but not limited to:
Multilinguality: PaLM 2 is more heavily trained on multilingual text, spanning more than 100 languages. This has significantly improved its ability to understand, generate and translate nuanced text — including idioms, poems and riddles — across a wide variety of languages, a hard problem to solve. PaLM 2 also passes advanced language proficiency exams at the “mastery” level.
Reasoning: PaLM 2’s wide-ranging dataset includes scientific papers and web pages that contain mathematical expressions. As a result, it demonstrates improved capabilities in logic, common sense reasoning, and mathematics.
Coding: PaLM 2 was pre-trained on a large quantity of publicly available source code datasets. This means that it excels at popular programming languages like Python and JavaScript, but can also generate specialized code in languages like Prolog, Fortran and Verilog.
Med-PaLM 2 has the power to change the way healthcare is practiced across the world. It can democratise knowledge and help providers and patients achieve better outcomes
This article borrows heavily from Google’s blog