AI-powered personalised medicine could revolutionise healthcare (and no, we’re not putting ChatGPT in charge)

theguardian.com:

F rom the soaring costs of US healthcare to the recurrent NHS crisis, it can often seem that effective and affordable healthcare is impossible. This will only get worse as chronic conditions grow in prevalence and we discover new ways to treat previously fatal diseases. These new treatments tend to be costly, while new approaches can be hard to introduce into healthcare systems that are either resistant to change or fatigued by too much of it. Meanwhile, growing demand for social care is compounding funding pressure and making the allocation of resources even more complicated.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is often glibly posed as the answer for services that are already forced to do more with less. Yet the idea that intelligent computers could simply replace humans in medicine is a fantasy. AI tends not to work well in the real world. Complexity proves an obstacle. So far, AI technologies have had little impact on the messy, inherently human world of medicine. But what if AI tools were designed specifically for real-world medicine – with all its organisational, scientific, and economic complexity?

This “reality-centric” approach to AI is the focus of the lab I lead at Cambridge University. Working closely with clinicians and hospitals, we develop AI tools for researchers, doctors, nurses and patients. People often think the principal opportunities for AI in healthcare lie in analysing images, such as MRI scans, or finding new drug compounds. But there are many opportunities beyond. One of the things our lab studies is personalised or precision medicine. Rather than one-size-fits-all, we look to see how treatments can be customised to reflect an individual’s unique medical and lifestyle profile.

Using AI-powered