Improving Your AI IQ #5

By Isabella Aranda Garcia

The internet started off as a whisper, slowly gaining its voice. AI, on the other hand, started off singing opera. The AI revolution is advancing at rapid speed; companies are building massive data centers, new AI-related and AI-adjacent jobs are coming into existence, and AI is becoming a must-have tool to excel at any job. If you’re not already, it’s time to get comfortable with AI, and we’re here to help with this new series. You can thank us later.

Even if you’re skeptical about AI, its cutting-edge technology is already driving incredible medical breakthroughs helping patients & doctors. Diagnoses are faster and more accurate, treatments are becoming easier to access, and new research is uncovering solutions for conditions that have long been understudied, giving hope to people who previously had few options for relief. Here are some of our favorite medical breakthroughs designed to help medical professionals.

Problem:

Clinical trials drive medical breakthroughs, but recruiting the right participants can be slow, complicated and frustrating.

Solution:

Pense Health is working to simplify the process by connecting patients with sponsors and research partners while filtering their medical records to quickly determine eligibility. By centralizing and organizing the data in one place, Pense Health helps researchers find participants faster and keep medical advances moving forward.

Problem:

MRI scans are powerful, but they can still miss the subtle signs of brain injury, leaving doctors and patients in the dark.

Solution:

Most MRI scans run on 1.5T or 3T systems (tesla, for the imaging nerds) that can sometimes miss subtle signs of brain injury. Higher-resolution scans exist, but they’re expensive and not always available. So researchers are using AI to improve those lower-resolution 3T images, upgrading the clarity of existing scans to 7T without needing a more advanced machine. If it works, it could make high-quality brain imaging far more accessible.

Problem:

Perimenopause and menopause come with a whirlwind of symptoms that can be hard to track, making it difficult for women to communicate what they’re experiencing to their doctor.

Solution:

Amissa taps into data already available through smartphones and wearables (on iOS and Android devices) to help you track and explain what you’re experiencing so doctors can more easily identify perimenopause and menopause. The platform adds actual data—body temperature, heart rate, sleep quality, etc.—to your reported symptoms and helps identify trends. The result? A PDF (in proper format) that you can hand your doctor so they can gain clearer insight into how menopause is progressing and what treatments might help manage it.

Problem:

Progression for Parkinson’s disease is determined during doctors’ visits every 3 to 6 months, where the clinician observes movement changes and asks the patient questions. It’s often not enough to accurately determine the progression.

Solution:

Researchers are developing an AI-enabled system that transforms short videos of patients into data. Patients use their smartphones to take videos of specific movement tasks and the system will identify key areas of the body and measure subtle signals, such as the speed and rhythm of a finger tap and walking patterns. They are also working towards including more movements, such as facial expressions and speech. Currently in development and testing, the goal is to create an app that will eventually use video to provide physicians with an analysis of the disease’s progression and severity between appointments, allowing a patient’s changes to be detected and treated earlier.

We tip our hats to:

Every Cure

This one is for patients. When it comes to treating and/or curing rare diseases, research progresses slowly because the cost-benefit ratio is minimal. One of the more cost-effective ways to treat more common diagnoses is to repurpose a medication designed for a condition with the same underlying problem. However, finding the matching condition still takes time and money. So Every Cure, launched in 2022, is using AI to “look across 22,000 diseases and 3,000 drugs to quantify the strength of 66 million drug-disease matches within days.” Then, their human team handles the details, like determining the highest possible matches and generating evidence about effectiveness. And, if you need another reason to love them, Every Cure operates as a nonprofit, prioritizing patients over the profit-first mindset of traditional pharma.

This article was published in the March/April 2026 edition of Connect to Northern Westchester.