{"id":19555,"date":"2025-09-19T00:04:12","date_gmt":"2025-09-19T00:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=19555"},"modified":"2025-09-19T00:04:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T00:04:12","slug":"reading-the-grammar-of-illness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=19555","title":{"rendered":"Reading the grammar of illness"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>In what could mark a turning point for modern medicine, European scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model capable of predicting future illnesses years before symptoms emerge.<\/p>\n<p>The system, called Delphi-2M, was unveiled in a paper published in Nature on Wednesday. Drawing on the same &#8220;transformer&#8221; architecture behind consumer chatbots such as ChatGPT, the tool analyses medical histories to forecast the likelihood of more than 1,000 diseases.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We&#8217;ve essentially taught the AI to read the grammar of healthcare,&#8221; explained Moritz Gerstung of the German Cancer Research Center. &#8220;It learns how diagnoses occur in sequence and combination, enabling very meaningful predictions about what might come next.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>To train the model, researchers tapped into Britain&#8217;s UK Biobank, a vast biomedical database holding details of half a million people. They then tested its accuracy using Denmark&#8217;s national health records covering nearly two million individuals.<\/p>\n<p>Charts presented by Gerstung showed the AI flagging patients with unusually high or low risk of heart attacks compared with standard age-based predictions. Co-author Tom Fitzgerald of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory noted that such systems could one day &#8220;optimise resources across already stretched healthcare systems&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Still, experts caution against premature hype. The datasets used \u2014 primarily British and Danish \u2014 were limited in terms of age and ethnicity, raising concerns about bias. &#8220;It&#8217;s a long way from improved healthcare,&#8221; warned Peter Bannister of the Institution of Engineering and Technology.<\/p>\n<p>Even so, the tool&#8217;s potential is hard to ignore. Unlike current risk calculators such as Britain&#8217;s QRISK3, which focus narrowly on cardiovascular health, Delphi-2M can scan for thousands of diseases simultaneously and years in advance.<\/p>\n<p>Ewan Birney, another co-author, said such breadth opens the door to &#8220;preventative medicine on a scale never seen before&#8221;. Gustavo Sudre, a professor of medical AI at King&#8217;s College London, added that the project was a &#8220;significant step towards scalable, interpretable and ethically responsible predictive modelling.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The bigger picture<\/p>\n<p>While not ready for clinical use, Delphi-2M hints at a future where healthcare shifts from reactive treatment to proactive prevention. Doctors could monitor high-risk patients earlier, intervene before crises, and relieve some of the pressure on overburdened systems.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In what could mark a turning point for modern medicine, European scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model capable of predicting future illnesses years before symptoms emerge. The system, called Delphi-2M, was unveiled in a paper published in Nature on Wednesday. Drawing on the same &#8220;transformer&#8221; architecture behind consumer chatbots such as ChatGPT, the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19555\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}