Conversation with Vivek Natarajan

Welcome to BrainX AI in Medicine Podcast series, where we bring in leaders within fields of AI and Medicine to discuss their cutting-edge research, explore boundaries of current knowledge, and provide insightful commentary on how to effectively lead the AI revolution in Medicine. Today's guest is Vivek Natarajan, who is a Research Scientist at Google leading research at the intersection of large language models (LLMs) and biomedicine. In particular, Vivek is the lead researcher behind Med-PaLM and Med-PaLM 2, which were the first AI systems to obtain passing and expert level scores on US Medical License exam questions respectively. Med-PaLM was recently published in Nature and has been featured in The Scientific American, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, among many others. More recently, Vivek also led the development of Med-PaLM M, the first demonstration of a generalist biomedical AI system and AMIE, a research AI system, which surpassed Primary Care Physicians on multiple axes pertaining to diagnostic dialogue in an randomized study conducted in the style of a virtual Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). Over the years, Vivek’s research has been published in well-regarded journals and conferences like Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Biomedical Engineering, JMLR, CVPR, and NeurIPS. It also forms the basis for several regulated medical device products under clinical trials at Google, including the NHS AI award winning breast cancer detection system Mammo Reader and the skin condition classification system DermAssist.