Startup Diagnoss has developed an artificial intelligence-based coding assistant to help automate the painstaking process of medical coding and billing. The Diagnoss AI medical coding engine acts as a "sidebar" to electronic health records (EHRs) and uses machine learning to improve a clinician's accuracy. The tool provides real-time feedback to medical practices during the administrative process and helps to reduce coding errors on claims. Abboud Chaballout, founder and CEO of Berkeley, California-based Diagnoss, compares the AI tool to an assistant whispering in a doctor's ear. The AI tool works similarly to the Grammarly AI grammar-checking tool.

Having risen to fame on its superhuman performance at playing games, the artificial intelligence group DeepMind has cracked a serious scientific problem that has stumped researchers for half a century. With its latest AI program, AlphaFold, the company and research laboratory showed it can predict how proteins fold into 3D shapes, a fiendishly complex process that is fundamental to understanding the biological machinery of life. Independent scientists said the breakthrough would help researchers tease apart the mechanisms that drive some diseases and pave the way for designer medicines, more nutritious crops and "green enzymes" that can break down plastic pollution. DeepMind said it had started work with a handful of scientific groups and would focus initially on malaria, sleeping sickness and leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease. "It marks an exciting moment for the field," said Demis Hassabis, DeepMind's founder and chief executive.

If DeepMind's methods can be refined, he and other researchers said, they could speed the development of new drugs as well as efforts to apply existing medications to new viruses and diseases. The breakthrough arrives too late to make a significant impact on the coronavirus. But researchers believe DeepMind's methods could accelerate the response to future pandemics. Some believe it could also help scientists gain a better understanding of genetic diseases along the lines of Alzheimer's or cystic fibrosis. Still, experts cautioned that this technology would affect only a small part of the long process by which scientists identify new medicines and analyze disease.