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Doctors Horrified After Google's Healthcare AI Makes Up a Body Part That Does Not Exist in
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Neoscope
Posted: August 23rd, 2025
https://futurism.com/neoscope/google-healthcare-ai-makes-up-...
Health practitioners are becoming increasingly uneasy about the medical community making widespread use of error-prone generative AI tools. In their May 2024 research paper introducing a healthcare AI model, dubbed Med-Gemini, Google researchers showed off the AI analyzing brain scans from the radiology lab for various conditions. It identified an "old left basilar ganglia infarct," referring to a purported part of the brain — "basilar ganglia" — that simply doesn't exist in the human body. Board-certified neurologist Bryan Moore flagged the issue ... highlighting that Google fixed its blog post about the AI — but failed to revise the research paper itself. The AI likely conflated the basal ganglia, an area of the brain that's associated with motor movements and habit formation, and the basilar artery, a major blood vessel at the base of the brainstem. Google blamed the incident on a simple misspelling of "basal ganglia." It's an embarrassing reveal that underlines persistent and impactful shortcomings of the tech. In Google's search results, this can lead to headaches for users during their research and fact-checking efforts. But in a hospital setting, those kinds of slip-ups could have devastating consequences. While Google's faux pas more than likely didn't result in any danger to human patients, it sets a worrying precedent, experts argue. In a medical context, AI hallucinations could easily lead to confusion and potentially even put lives at risk.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and corruption in science.
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