Mars exploration mission <\/p>\n
As human-spaceflight missions grow longer and travel farther from Earth, keeping crews healthy gets more challenging.<\/p>\n
Astronauts on the International Space Station can depend on real-time calls to Houston, regular cargo deliveries of medicines, and a quick ride home after six months. All of that may soon change as NASA and its commercial partners, like Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, look to conduct longer-duration missions that would take humans to the Moon and Mars.<\/p>\n
That looming reality is pushing NASA to gradually make on-orbit medical care more \u201cEarth-independent.\u201d One early experiment is a proof-of-concept AI medical assistant the agency is building with Google. The tool, called Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA), is designed to help astronauts diagnose and treat symptoms when no doctor is available or communications to Earth are blacked out.<\/p>\n
The multi-modal tool, which includes speech, text and images, runs inside Google Cloud\u2019s Vertex AI environment.<\/p>\n
The project is operating under a fixed-price Google Public Sector Subscription agreement, which includes the cost for cloud services, the application development infrastructure and model training, David Cruley, customer engineer at Google\u2019s Public Sector business unit, told TechCrunch. NASA owns the source code to the app and has helped fine-tune the models. The Google Vertex AI platform provides access to models from Google and other third parties.<\/p>\n
The two organizations have put CMO-DA through three scenarios: an ankle injury, flank pain, and ear pain. A trio of physicians, one being an astronaut, graded the assistant\u2019s performance across the initial evaluation, history-taking, clinical reasoning, and treatment.<\/p>\n
The trio found a high degree of diagnostic accuracy, judging the flank pain evaluation and treatment plan to be 74% likely correct; ear pain, 80%; and 88% for the ankle injury.<\/p>\n