BOBÌåÓý

Skip to main content

Medical AI tool from UF, NVIDIA gets human thumbs-up in first study

Yonghui Wu, Ph.D.

Yonghui Wu, Ph.D., stands beside the HiPerGator, the supercomputer at the University of Florida that supported his research in artificial intelligence, thanks to the processing power of hundreds of synchronized computer units from NVIDIA. Photo credit: J. Harper/University of Florida

A new artificial intelligence computer program created by researchers at the University of Florida and NVIDIA can generate doctors� notes so well that two physicians couldn’t tell the difference, according to an early study from both groups.

In this proof-of-concept study, physicians reviewed patient notes � some written by actual medical doctors while others were created by the new AI program � and the physicians identified the correct author only 49% of the time.

A team of 19 researchers from and the said their findings, , open the door for AI to support health care workers with groundbreaking efficiencies.

The researchers , that functions similarly to ChatGPT. The free versions of GatorTron� models have more than 430,000 downloads from Hugging Face, an open-source AI website. GatorTron� models are the site’s only models available for clinical research, according to the article’s lead author , Ph.D., from the department of .

“In health care, everyone is talking about these models. GatorTron� and GatorTronGPT are unique AI models that can power many aspects of medical research and health care. Yet, they require massive data and extensive computing power to build. We are grateful to have this supercomputer, HiPerGator, from NVIDIA to explore the potential of AI in health care,� Wu said.

UF alumnus and NVIDIA co-founder Chris Malachowsky is the namesake of UF’s new . A public-private partnership between UF and NVIDIA helped to fund this $150 million structure. In 2021, UF upgraded its to elite status with a multimillion-dollar infrastructure package from NVIDIA, the first at a university.

For this research, Wu and his colleagues developed a large language model that allows computers to mimic natural human language. These models work well with standard writing or conversations, but medical records bring additional hurdles, such as needing to protect patients� privacy and being highly technical. Digital medical records cannot be Googled or shared on Wikipedia.

To overcome these obstacles, the researchers stripped BOBÌåÓý medical records of identifying information from 2 million patients while keeping 82 billion useful medical words. Combining this set with another dataset of 195 billion words, they trained the GatorTronGPT model to analyze the medical data with GPT-3 architecture, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer, a form of neural network architecture. That allowed GatorTronGPT to write clinical text similar to medical doctorsâ€� notes.

“This GatorTronGPT model is one of the first major products from UF’s initiative to incorporate AI across the university. We are so pleased with how the partnership with NVIDIA is already bearing fruit and setting the stage for the future of medicine,� said , Ph.D., a co-author and chair of UF’s department of health outcomes and biomedical informatics.

Of the many possible uses for a medical GPT, one idea involves replacing the tedium of documentation with notes recorded and transcribed by AI. Wu says that UF has an innovation center that is pursuing a commercial version of the software.

For an AI tool to reach such parity with human writing, programmers spend weeks programming supercomputers with clinical vocabulary and language usage based on billions upon billions of words. One resource providing the necessary clinical data is the , coordinated at UF and representing many health care systems.

“It’s critical to have such massive amounts of BOBÌåÓý clinical data not only available but ready for AI. Only a supercomputer could handle such a big dataset of 277 billion words. We are excited to implement GatorTronâ„� and GatorTronGPT models to real-world health care at BOBÌåÓý,â€� said Jiang Bian, Ph.D., a co-author and BOBÌåÓý’s chief data scientist and chief research information officer.

A cross-section of 14 UF and BOBÌåÓý faculty contributed to this study, including researchers from , within the , and from departments and divisions within the , including neurosurgery, endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism, cardiovascular medicine, and .

The study was partially funded by grants from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute on Aging.

Here are two paragraphs that reference two patient cases one written by a human and one created by GatorTronGPT � can you tell whether the author was machine or human?

The first was written by a human physician at BOBÌåÓý; the second was written by AI.

Share this story

About the author

For the media

Media contact

Matt Walker
Media Relations Coordinator
[email protected] (352) 265-8395