Healthcare
Meet AMIE, Google’s Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer
Table of Contents
Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE)
Anyone who has ever had to sit in a waiting room for a long time might appreciate Google’s newest innovation.
Google DeepMind is introducing the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer, or AMIE. AMIE is a medical AI assistant that takes a patient’s history and symptoms and determines a diagnosis with incredible accuracy.
According to the subjects who tested AMIE, the AI surpassed real doctors in 24 out of 26 different metrics, including empathy.
How Does Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer Work?
A patient will tell the medical intelligence explorer what symptoms they’re experiencing. AMIE will take the patient’s history and evaluate the symptoms. After, it will ask a series of questions until it determines a diagnosis. By the time the patient reaches a human doctor, the initial diagnostic conversation will already be done. The doctor will be free to move on to the next step of treating the patient.
The exact nature of the hardware hasn’t yet been revealed. However, Google and DeepMind are promising a user-friendly, text-chat-based experience. It will be available in a wide variety of medical clinics, much like 3D printing in hospitals.
How Does the Articulate Medical Explorer Help Doctors?
Google’s Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer will streamline the treatment of patients by diagnosing a problem so that the doctor can get straight to the treatment needed.
The conversation between a doctor and a patient is more complicated than one might realize. In one go, doctors need to:
- Have extensive medical knowledge.
- Have the ability to instantly analyze the patient’s responses.
- Pick out the key information that will lead to the next question.
- Diagnose a patient correctly.
That seems like a lot to ask of an AI, but AMIE does it so well, that people hired to test the program have rated it to be as good as a real-life physician. And in some cases, even better.
How Was AMIE Developed?
Google DeepMind’s Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer, or AMIE, was fed transcripts of almost 100,000 real-life conversations between doctors and patients. As well, they included detailed summaries of notes from intensive care unit cases and thousands of questions from the United States Medical Licensing Examination.
It would take the average human years to absorb that much information and it still wouldn’t be enough. That’s because these kinds of human interactions can be imprecise, full of unnecessary detail, and incomplete.
The research team also developed a continuous cycle of examination and critical analysis to allow AMIE to continue to grow and develop with each interaction.
AMIE Surpassed Doctors in Empathy
Subjects underwent Diagnostic conversations with AMIE. They were not told whether they were talking to a human doctor or articulate medical AI. They were then asked to evaluate their experience on 26 different metrics such as accuracy and efficiency.
The patients rated AMIE over a real-life doctor in 24 out of 26 of those metrics. Amazingly, one of those metrics where the AI system outranked the human doctor, was empathy.
One can only imagine if, in the future, Organoid Intelligence is brought into the mix.
Will Articulate Medical Intelligence Replace Doctors?
While Google’s Medical Explorer was rated higher than real doctors in 24 different metrics, it’s important to understand that Google’s medical AI will only complement the work of human doctors. It won’t be a replacement. No matter how good the AMIE system is, there are things a computer just can’t replace.
Benefits of Articulate Medical Explorer
Google and DeepMind’s Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer can:
- Reduce patient wait times.
- provide quick and accurate alternatives to in-person care.
- Lead doctors to quicker and more accurate conclusions.
- Provide medical care in remote areas where medical staff is limited.
However, the researchers have not lost sight of AMIE’s limitations.
Cons of Articulate Medical Explorer
Although the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer was rated higher than human doctors in 24 different metrics, AI lacks the instinct to handle delicate situations required for issues like ethics. Some cons include the following:
- It may take time for doctors to leave something as important as medical care in the virtual hands of an AI.
- AMIE is limited only to the knowledge fed to it.
- It still needs to be more advanced to provide a diagnosis for complex queries.
It’s safe to say that human medical personnel will be around for a long time to come.
The Future of AMIE
AMIE’s future as a diagnostic tool is incredibly promising. It has the potential to revolutionize the way patients experience healthcare on a global scale.
It’s very important to remember, however, that AMIE is still only at the research stage. There’s plenty more fine-tuning and testing to do. Researchers also recognize the critical importance of moving forward with caution. AMIE might become a common feature in clinics and hospitals in the future.
IC Inspiration
Thank goodness for Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett.
If it weren’t for her and her relentless determination, we might all still be locked in our houses hiding behind masks and waiting for the hours to pass.
Anyone who lived through the pandemic years will never forget it. Those few weeks in early 2020 were the worst. That was the time when Covid had officially spread to all corners of the globe, and the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a worldwide pandemic.
We all sat on the edge of our seats, at home, with no idea what to expect. Meanwhile, Dr. Kizzmekia “Kizzy” Corbett-Helaire was locked in her lab with the biggest and most important assignment of her life:
Find a vaccine for COVID-19.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about Kizzy is that she saw this coming. In February 2020, as the first reports of the virus were coming out of Asia, she knew that this had the potential to become a pandemic.
She told PopSugar “I remember sitting my mom on her bed and telling her, ‘I don’t know what’s going on right now, but . . . this is going to be far bigger than we could probably ever imagine,'”
It’s hard to imagine the pressure the doctor felt. She worked 16 to 20 hours a day as news poured in on more and more cases around the world.
“As one of the people who had the only tool out of it, it was so hard to experience. People were dying, and you knew that more people would die if you didn’t hurry and if you didn’t do a great job.”
Talk about a high-pressure task. She was probably more aware than any of us of the number of people losing their lives each day.
Yet, she was also the best person for the task. This was not just because she holds a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology with expertise in the challenges and benefits of viruses. It was also because of her furious determination to do what she set out to do.
It was a very high-stress situation. It meant being away from her family, church, and her favorite activities.
Somewhere in the middle of the storm, she had a sudden realization.
“I had to protect my spirit or the vaccine would’ve failed, because there is no way that you can do a job of that level without a protected self.”
So, for the sake of a world that was waiting for relief, she started meditating and exercising again.
In November of 2020, Kizzy received the good news everyone had been waiting for. The final test results were in. The vaccine that she and her team had developed was highly effective against the COVID-19 virus.
“I just remember crying,” she says, “All of the trauma was somewhere deep down, suppressed really, and the relief of the trial results just let it all come out.”