Industry Watcher’s Digest

Buzzworthy developments of the past few days.

• President Biden is seeking $20B to fund all sorts of AI research in 2025. As always around this time of year, the White House positions the budget request as equal parts plea for spending money to Congress and statement of policy priorities to America. Of interest to healthcare AI stakeholders, the Administration would like $10 million for AI in VA clinical trials and $2 million for AI in administering benefits for veterans. The elite D.C.-based law firm Akin nicely breaks it down here.
   
• The VA’s ears must be ringing AI tones. The Biden Administration isn’t the only one with the agency on its mind vis-à-vis AI. This week the Federal News Network takes a look at what the VA is doing with AI for veterans and for the VA health workers who serve them.
   
• ‘Europe is now a global standard-setter in AI.’ So brags Thierry Breton, European Commissioner for Internal Market, on the platform formerly known as Twitter. The source of Breton’s pride is the passage of the EU’s AI Act by a wide margin (523 yeas, 46 nays and a few dozen abstentions). The law reaches far and wide. In fact, some are calling it “the world’s most comprehensive regulatory framework for AI.” Information Week concurs with that descriptor, noting the new rules will give the EU power to fine noncomplying businesses 7% of global revenues or $38 million—“whichever is greater.” The outlet’s analysis is aimed at CIOs but accessible to all.
   
• Make way for hypothesis-driven AI in healthcare. As developed by Mayo Clinic researchers, this new kid on the medical AI block integrates scientific questions—aka hypotheses—so as to uncover insights likely to be missed by conventional AI. Mayo pharmacologist Hu Li, PhD, one of the lead researchers involved in the work, says hypothesis-driven AI can overcome AI’s “rubbish in, rubbish out” shortcomings. The new way, he suggests, will “yield significant insights that can help form testable hypotheses and move medicine forward.” Mayo News Network coverage here, scientific paper by Hu Li and colleagues here.
   
• Here’s more AI confidence emanating from Rochester, Minnesota. “Not far in the future, we will see living databases that undergo nightly self-updates from EMR data streams and allow continuous retraining of models that combine clinical features from radiology, pathology and more into true multimodal predictive machines,” Jacob Shreve, MD, a Mayo senior oncology fellow, states in OncLive. Along the march from here to there, Shreve adds, AI developers will come up with models that “not only outperform their counterparts but also demonstrate the maturity, rigor and reproducibility that is expected in medicine.”
   
• Emerging Covid variants with deadly potential can be sniffed out with AI a lot faster than without. Proof-of-concept research has borne this out in the U.K. The underlying idea is to formulate variant-specific vaccines and possibly antidotes before any one variant multiplies itself into a population-level outbreak. The work also may help avoid wasting time on Covid strains unlikely to gain traction. Learn more here.
   
• Now where were we on whether or not AI will annihilate humankind? Oh yes. We were briefly hung up on an alarming report from Gladstone AI commissioned by the U.S. State Department. This week’s entry in the genre is a report from the Forecasting Research Institute. More precisely, it’s from coverage of the report by a fellow traveler on the AI beat. “Is it extraordinary to believe that AI will kill all of humanity when humanity has been around for hundreds of thousands of years?” asks Vox writer Dylan Matthews, only half-rhetorically, I think. “[O]r is it extraordinary to believe that humanity would continue to survive alongside smarter-than-human AI?” Either way, we’re all in this together. Read the FRI report here and Dylan Matthews’s piece on it here.
   
• A few upcoming events of note:
   
  • Dartmouth’s AI in Medicine: Bridging Innovation & Practice. Hanover, N.H., April 3.
     
  • Bio-IT World Conference & Expo. Boston (and virtual), April 15-17. 
     
  • SIIM24: Making Waves in Imaging Informatics. National Harbor, Md., June 27-29.
     
• From AIin.Healthcare’s news partners:
   
  • Health Imaging: Philips moves digital pathology to the cloud with AWS
     
  • Cardiovascular Business: AI-based CAD assessments as accurate as FFR, new 10-year study confirms