European scientists have developed a new artificial intelligence model, trained on large-scale health records, which can predict susceptibility to more than 1,000 diseases decades into the future. The generative AI system called Delphi-2M was built at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Cambridge, using “similar architecture to large language models but with key innovations to work with healthcare data”, said Tom Fitzgerald of EMBL. Delphi was trained on anonymised medical records from 400,000 participants in UK Biobank. The researchers then tested the model successfully on data from 1.9mn patients in the Danish National Patient Registry. The predictions across more than 1,000 diseases generally matched the accuracy of existing tools that have a far narrower focus, such as the QRisk score for heart conditions. Results were published in Nature on Wednesday. “Our model is a proof of concept, showing that it’s possible for AI to learn many of our long-term health patterns and use this information to generate meaningful predictions,” said Ewan Birney, EMBL’s interim executive director.

Full report : New AI tool can predict a person’s risk of more than 1,000 diseases, say experts.