Applications and Challenges of Artificial Intelligence Technologies in Healthcare

Abstract

We introduce three research initiatives aimed at realizing medical AI that supports and collaborates closely with healthcare professionals. The first initiative involves the development of a platform that ena-bles anyone to participate in the research and development of medical AI. The goal is to democratize access and foster inclusive innovation in the field. The second focuses on technologies that enhance medical professionals’ learning. For instance, we developed a system that allows users to retrieve medical images from a database by sketching desired findings, eliminating the need for example query images. Additionally, we devised a method to efficiently generate paired images—with and without specific findings—for use in effective medical education. The third initiative is the research and development of a large language model (LLM) tailored to the Japanese medical context. Through a collaborative project, we have been developing a medical LLM aimed at improving the quality of healthcare, supporting medical administration, and facil-itating research and discovery of medical knowledge. Establishing proper governance frameworks is essen-tial to ensure the safe and effective secondary use of clinical data.