Babylon bot outscores doctors in exams

A bot built by Babylon Health has outperformed the average clinician in the MRCGP exam, the UK’s Royal College of General Practitioners final test for trainee doctors.

Answering a representative sample of questions from publicly available sources, the bot scored 82% compared to the 72% average clinician score.

Dr Ali Parsa, Babylon Health’s founder and CEO: “Tonight’s results clearly illustrate how AI-augmented health services can reduce the burden on healthcare systems around the world.”

Babylon claimed the AI system could also provide health advice to patients ‘on par with practising clinicians’.

Former IBM engineers criticise Watson

Former engineers caught up in layoffs at IBM say the company is failing to turn a profit with their AI system, Watson.

They say Watson has great AI but IBM are mismanaging it.

Speaking anonymously to IEEE Spectrum, one engineer said: “Smaller companies are eating us alive, they’re better, faster, cheaper. They’re winning our contracts, taking our customers, doing better at AI.”

Layoffs in May decimated the Watson Health division, mainly hitting employees from companies IBM has recently acquired.

Leading financial services company Jefferies LLC argued say Watson won’t be profitable, despite IBM’s heavy investment of over $15 billion.

First FDA-cleared AI system deployed

IDx-DR, the first autonomous AI diagnostic system cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been deployed.

The University of Iowa Healthcare are the first to use the tool, which detects diabetic retinopathy in medical images, helping prevent blindness in diabetes patients.

Dale Abel, MD, director of the division of endocrinology and metabolism at UIHC said: “Early detection of diabetic retinopathy is an essential component of comprehensive diabetes care.”

“This innovation further strengthens our ability to provide state-of-the-art care for our patients with diabetes.”

After just a few hours of training, non-clinical UIHC staff could use the system to perform diabetic retinopathy testing.

These stories appeared in AIMed Magazine issue 04, which is available here.