2025-09-25
7 分钟The Economist Hello, this is Alok Jha,
host of Babbage, our weekly podcast on science and technology.
Welcome to Editors Pics.
We've chosen an unmissable article from the latest edition of The Economist.
Please do have a listen.
Much of the art of medicine involves working out,
through detailed questioning and physical examination, which disease a given patient has contracted.
Far harder, but no less desirable,
would be identifying which diseases a patient might develop in the future.
This is what the team behind a new artificial intelligence, AI model,
details of which were published in Nature on September 17th, claims to do.
Though the model, named Delphi2M, is not yet ready for deployment in hospitals,
its creators hope it could one day allow doctors to predict
if their patients are likely to get one of more than 1,000 different conditions,
including Alzheimer's disease, cancer and heart attacks, which all affect many millions every year.
In addition to helping flag patients who are at high risk,
it might also help health authorities allocate budgets for disease areas that may need extra funds in the future.
The model was developed by teams at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory,
EMBL in Cambridge, and the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg.
It takes inspiration from large language models, LLMs such as GPT5,