Abridge And Mila Partner To Apply Advances In AI To Medical Conversations

By AIT News Desk On Jul 27, 2021

Mila and healthcare AI startup Abridge announce partnership to develop and apply advances in artificial intelligence to medical conversations

The healthcare AI startup that helps patients better stay on top of their health, Abridge, announced a partnership with the University of Montreal AI research institute Mila. The collaboration will deepen research contributions to the rapidly evolving field of medical conversation understanding and expand Abridge’s machine learning capabilities.

“Our mission at Abridge is to help people understand and follow-through on their health — much of which is powered by machine learning,” said Sandeep Konam, CTO and co-founder of Abridge. “From our earliest days, our goal has been to advance medical conversation AI and improve healthcare delivery experiences for people and their doctors. Our partnership with Mila gives us the opportunity to expand our research and continue to engage with leading innovators. The progress we make together will benefit many more people than either of us might reach on our own.”

Abridge highlights the key details of medical conversations, including instructions, medications, and follow-ups, making it easier to revisit important details and share the conversation with family. Abridge also shares clinically structured summaries with health professionals to help them save time and focus on patient experiences and outcomes. To solve complex challenges in understanding and summarizing medical conversations, the company invested upfront in annotating a one-of-a-kind, de-identified dataset containing over 10,000 hours of transcribed conversations from fully informed and consenting patients. Using this rich dataset, they built domain adaptation modules that can correct transcription errors, classifiers that can flag key takeaways, and language generation models that can create actionable summaries. Abridge contributes regularly to premier machine learning conferences and workshops, in the spirit of promoting open research and collaborating closely with academic communities.

Mila’s dedication to the socially responsible and beneficial development of AI closely aligns with Abridge’s commitment to ensuring that their technology is distributed fairly to all groups and will lead to more medical comprehension for everyone. “Since our founding, we’ve been committed to solving problems according to people’s real needs and pursuing the development of AI for social good,” said Yoshua Bengio of Mila. “That’s why we’re looking forward to partnering with Abridge — not only for our shared focus on machine learning, but also because we are both dedicated to developing technology responsibly and in service of others.”