Microsoft says it has built an artificial intelligence-powered medical platform that it claims is four times more successful than doctors at diagnosing complex diseases. The tech giant is revealing research it believes could speed up treatment. Called the “Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator,” it is the first work to emerge from the company’s healthcare unit formed last year by Mustafa Suleyman.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Microsoft’s AI executive said the company is a step towards “medical superintelligence” that could help solve staffing crises and reduce long wait times for overwhelmed healthcare systems.
To test its capabilities, the platform was fed 304 studies from the New England Journal of Medicine, which describe some of the most complex cases that doctors have ever treated and solved. Project leader Mustafa Suleyman said Microsoft is building “AI models that are not just marginally better, but profoundly better than human performance: faster, cheaper and four times more accurate.” “This will be truly transformative,” he added. Microsoft has invested nearly $14 billion in OpenAI and has exclusive rights to use and sell its technology.