Google Teams Up with NASA on AI “Space Doctor”
NASA and Google are joining forces to build an AI medical assistant, the Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA).
This tool is designed to help astronauts diagnose and treat health issues during deep-space missions especially when direct contact with Earth or onboard physicians is limited or delayed.
Key Points
Purpose: Enable autonomous medical care for astronauts on long-duration missions (e.g., to the Moon or Mars), where communication delays or loss of connectivity make Earth-based support difficult.
Platform: Built on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, CMO-DA employs natural language processing, machine learning, and a multi-modal interface supporting speech, text, and image inputs.
Training Data: It’s trained on spaceflight medical literature and open-source data, focusing on the 250 most common medical conditions encountered in space.
How It Works
CMO-DA gathers symptom data via speech, text, or images and analyzes it using trained AI models to suggest diagnoses and treatment plans.
It’s designed to assist not replace medical officers. It helps evaluate health, make real-time decisions, and guide care until experts can intervene.
Physicians and astronauts graded the tool’s performance, ensuring that diagnostic reasoning and clinical recommendations were accurately evaluated.
Early Test Results
Evaluated using the OSCE (Objective Structured Clinical Examination) framework, early trials indicate:Ankle injury diagnosis: 88% accuracy, Ear pain: 80%, Flank (side) pain: 74%.
These results suggest CMO-DA can reliably guide astronauts when human medical support isn’t available.
What’s Next
Google and NASA are refining CMO-DA by collaborating with medical professionals to make the system more aware of space-specific challenges such as the effects of microgravity and to integrate real-time data from onboard medical devices like ultrasounds.
The system currently operates under a fixed-price agreement, with NASA retaining ownership of the source code and working jointly with Google to fine-tune the AI models.
News Gist:
NASA and Google are developing an AI “space doctor” to help astronauts diagnose and treat illnesses during Moon and Mars missions, ensuring autonomous healthcare when Earth communication is delayed, with promising early test results.
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