Google's AMIE AI holds pre-visit talks with real patients – study in The Lancet
98 patients at a Boston clinic talked to Google's research chatbot before seeing a doctor. No conversation had to be stopped, and the AI's diagnoses mostly matched.
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Video: YouTube · Google Research · youtube.com
On October 8, Google presented results of a clinical study of its research chatbot AMIE, published in the medical journal The Lancet. Researchers from Google and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston had 98 patients at its primary care clinic talk to the AI before their urgent care visits. Google says it is the company's first publication in the flagship Lancet journal itself.
Supervising physicians monitored the conversations in real time. According to Google, none had to be interrupted under predefined safety criteria. AMIE's summaries helped clinicians prepare in 75 percent of cases and influenced their approach in more than half. The AI's differential diagnoses matched the doctors' final diagnoses 90 percent of the time.
AMIE is a research system, not a publicly available product. Google stresses that larger clinical trials are needed before patient-facing AI can be assessed at scale.