Since OpenAI’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, ChatGPT, rose to prominence in late 2022, AI has had a massive impact on society, and its use is rapidly increasing. In fact, a recent survey showed that 57% of adults in the United States use AI either once a day or several times a week. As its intelligence and capabilities continue to grow, AI has been increasingly used in the medical field, leading to remarkable breakthroughs in medicine and healthcare.
Throughout the past 200 years, when you’ve gone to your yearly doctor’s appointment, one tool has always remained the same: the stethoscope. Recently, however, a revolutionary AI-powered stethoscope was developed by researchers at Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. This AI stethoscope has been programmed to identify whether a patient has heart failure, atrial fibrillation, or heart valve disease in a mere 15 seconds. The stethoscope achieves this by taking an ECG recording of electrical signals from the heart while also listening to the sounds of blood flowing.
This new innovation has demonstrated promising results. A study trialled the stethoscope and consisted of approximately 12,000 people from 204 general practitioner surgeries, 96 with the new tool, and 108 without. Results proved that the new invention was 2.44 times as effective in diagnosing heart failure 12 months ahead, 1.92 times more likely to diagnose an individual with heart valve disease, and 3.45 times more likely to accurately diagnose atrial fibrillation in a patient. These findings will be presented at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress in Madrid, with further progress expected in the near future.
Another technological advancement that has recently been developed is the use of AI in gene editing to enhance powerful tools such as Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR). Since gene therapies are often complex and time-consuming, artificial intelligence could help speed processes up, as assistant professor of pathology and genetics, Le Cong, PhD, a leader of the development, states, “The hope is that CRISPR-GPT will help us develop new drugs in months, instead of years. In addition to helping students, trainees, and scientists work together, having an AI agent that speeds up experiments could also eventually help save lives.”
CRISPR-GPT, a technology created by Stanford Medicine researchers, suggests plans and approaches for relevant gene sequences to scientists using years of public research data, allowing even novice scientists to rapidly become familiar with the process. While a usual student goes through a lengthy process of trial and error, CRISPR-GPT guides the experiment, navigating between three different levels: beginner, expert, and Q&A. The beginner function offers recommendations as a teaching tool, answering questions along the way. The expert mode, on the other hand, is programmed to help advanced scientists tackle complicated problems, while any researcher can use the Q&A feature, which answers specific questions.
Another rising development using AI that was recently introduced to the medical field was an application called “OpenEvidence.” This platform, founded by Daniel Nadler and Zachary Ziegler, aims to allow healthcare professionals to access AI-powered medical information, including peer-reviewed medical literature from trusted sources like The Journal of the American Medical Association and The New England Journal of Medicine, to make efficient decisions about patient outcomes.
With all this in mind, artificial intelligence has already played a key role in medicine in the past few months of 2025. Looking ahead, it wouldn’t be surprising if AI continues to propel groundbreaking advancements, transforming healthcare through faster, more accurate, and specific solutions.