As tech giants like Apple turn their eyes towards AI-powered healthcare, Google is now building a new AI doctor in collaboration with NASA. But as PCMag reports, you might never get a chance to use the new model, unless you’re planning a trip to Mars, that is.
According to the NASA proof-of-concept slide deck, first spotted by TechCrunch, the project aims to tackle the problems of multi-year, long-distance space travel, dealing with issues like no real-time communication with Earth, no way to send medical samples back home, and the possibility of no evacuations in an emergency. For reference, Mars missions would have a lag of up to 223 minutes each way, making conventional real-time medical consultation near impossible.
The new tool, dubbed the Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA), will help provide medical advice and diagnostics completely independently of Earth. Per the slides, NASA eventually plans for the tool to incorporate things like ultrasound imaging and additional sources of biometric data in later versions.
The CMO-DA comes as part of the Artemis program, a NASA-led Moon exploration initiative, with the long-term goal of creating a permanent base on the Moon and making human missions to Mars. The tool runs on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI environment and uses open-source language models (LLMs) such as Llama 3 and Mistral-3 Small. The tool’s source code is entirely owned by NASA, according to a Google spokesperson speaking to TechCrunch.
The project’s team tested the AI diagnostics against a basket of common maladies using a panel of three doctors, including one who is also an astronaut. The model performed broadly well, achieving a 74% accuracy rate for flank pain, an 80% accuracy rate for ear pain, and an 88% accuracy rate for ankle injury.
Still, NASA highlights several potential pitfalls the chatbot will have to work around, such as lack of trust in AI tools—where even advanced models can make basic errors—and lack of data on spaceflight-related pathophysiology, for example how partial gravity conditions can impact health.
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