Review from the Bergson Academy: Fit for the future - how is AI revolutionizing health and medicine?

At our exciting Academy event "Fit for the future - how is AI revolutionizing health and medicine?", Dr. Carsten Marr, Dr. Peter Schardt (Siemens Healthineers) and Dr. Rainer Hutka (Bavarian State Ministry of Health, Care and Prevention) discussed the transformative role of artificial intelligence in health and medicine with our moderator and program director Maximilian Maier and our guests at the Barbastelle.

Dr. Carsten Marr, Director of the Institute of AI for Health at Helmholtz Munich, demonstrated the possibilities of AI research: "Nowadays, we can analyze incredibly large amounts of data from individual cells. This allows us to support diagnostics and thus gain insights into the development of diseases - which in turn can be the starting point for new therapies." Dr. Peter Schardt, CTO at Siemens Healthineers, provided an insight from the industry: "In the future, doctors could use a digital twin to calculate in advance whether and how a patient will respond to radiation and plan the radiation treatment accordingly. We have already been able to show in our research work that this already works technically today."

Dr. Rainer Hutka made it clear that Bavaria in particular is playing a pioneering role in artificial intelligence with an insight into current initiatives to promote AI in medicine.

In the further discussion, the participants took a look into the future: with digitized, networked and AI-integrated healthcare, diseases could be predicted individually in the future and corresponding preventive measures could delay or even completely prevent their development. The ethical and social challenges were not neglected either. Questions from the audience, for example on the transparency of algorithms, led to lively and forward-looking discussions.

The cooperation between Helmholtz Munich and the Bergson Kunstkraftwerk enables an exchange between science, industry, politics and the public. The event underscores Helmholtz Munich's goal of not only developing excellent medical research and innovations, but also bringing them to life in dialog with society.