Scientists have developed a new artificial intelligence tool that can predict a person's risk of more than 1,000 diseases, including cancer, up to 20 years in advance. The generative AI model, named Delphi-2M, was built by experts from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), the German Cancer Research Centre and the University of Copenhagen.
The tool uses algorithmic concepts similar to those in large language models (LLMs) and was trained on anonymised patient data from 400,000 people in the UK Biobank study and 1.9 million patients in the Danish national patient registry. It assesses the probability of developing diseases such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease and respiratory disorders by analysing medical events, lifestyle factors, age and sex.
Details of the breakthrough were published in the journal Nature. Tomas Fitzgerald, a staff scientist at EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute, said: 'Medical events often follow predictable patterns. Our AI model learns those patterns and can forecast future health outcomes.'
Health risks are expressed as rates over time, similar to weather forecasting. Ewan Birney, EMBL interim executive director, said patients might benefit from the tool within the next few years. He explained: 'You walk into the doctor's surgery and the clinician is very used to using these tools, and they are able to say: "Here's four major risks that are in your future and here's two things you could do to really change that."'
The team said Delphi-2M predicts disease rates with accuracy comparable to existing single-disease models, but can do so for all diseases at once over a long time period. Prof Moritz Gerstung, head of the division of AI in oncology at the German Cancer Research Centre, said: 'This is the beginning of a new way to understand human health and disease progression.'
