Episode Details

Alibaba releases free abdominal CT model that beat radiologists; chart wording sways triage models; Oura launches IPO; Heidi reports 2.8 million visits a week

The voices on this episode are generated, and so is the script, from the day's post at Physician in the Loop. Every fact in the post links to its source.

Read the post and its sources

Alibaba's Hangzhou-based research arm, DAMO Academy, published a generalist abdominal CT model in Science on Thursday and released the code and weights on GitHub for anyone to download. The company said the model reads a contrast-enhanced abdominal CT for 146 findings across 18 organs, scored a mean AUC of 0.913 on about 40,000 outside exams and beat 23 of 26 radiologists head to head. The figures are the company's own, reviewed by Science; the model was validated on Chinese patients only and has no clearance from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or any other regulator. Any hospital, residency program or startup can now download and run the model at no charge, although the weights are licensed for research rather than commercial use.

Two papers in npj Digital Medicine addressed language and authorship in clinical AI. Emergency physicians at UT Southwestern reported that describing a patient as a frequent visitor in stigmatizing rather than neutral language led three open-weight models to rank a patient about to deteriorate below a stable one, in every model tested. A St. Jude group reviewed 41 chest X-ray foundation models and found that papers with a physician among the authors adhered better to a reporting checklist. Separately, Oura launched its initial public offering on Monday morning, 50 million shares at $40 to $44 on the Nasdaq, with a prospectus that describes a wellness product rather than a medical device and does not mention the physicians to whom the company began routing members two weeks ago.

In this episode

• Alibaba's DAMO RADAR reads contrast abdominal CT for 146 findings, outperforms 23 of 26 radiologists in Science; weights free for research
• Stigmatizing language about frequent ED use leads three open models to rank deteriorating patients below stable ones in 221,556 comparisons
• Oura launches IPO of 50 million shares at $40 to $44; prospectus calls the ring a wellness product and does not mention physician care
• Papers with a physician co-author follow reporting checklist better, discuss fairness more in review of 41 chest X-ray foundation models
• Heidi says its scribe supports 2.8 million visits a week in 190 countries and 83% of clinicians it surveyed use AI with no employer policy