AI research to solve challenges in healthcare for older people

‍ AGE Research Group members welcomed Dr Elly Liang from Newcastle University School of Computing to speak at our lunchtime seminar series this week, held jointly with NIHR Biomedical Research Centre: Newcastle, our Faculty of Medical Sciences Long-Term Conditions and MultiMorbidity (LTCMM) Theme, and the Newcastle University Centre for Ageing. Elly leads the Artificial Intelligence (AI) research group within the School of Computing and shared insights into the methodological and applied AI work that her group are pioneering.

‍Examples included using insights from ecommerce uses of AI, multimodal AI techniques to piece together text, images and other healthcare information to improve diagnosis, the use of conversational AI to support healthcare training, and the evaluation of large language models in healthcare to protect against bias and hallucinations. Elly also outlined work on using AI to automate sarcopenia recognition on CT scans done before surgery – work that AGE Research Group members are collaborating on.

‍Our audience learned a lot – a reminder of the power of interdisciplinary interaction, and there are plenty of opportunities for further collaboration to harness the power of AI in an equitable and reliable way to improve the health care of older people for us all to work on as a result of Elly’s talk.

‍ ‍