MedPodGPT: A multilingual audio-augmented large language model for medical research and education.

The proliferation of medical podcasts has generated an extensive repository of audio content, rich in specialized terminology, diverse medical topics, and expert dialogues. Here we introduce a computational framework designed to enhance large language models (LLMs) by leveraging the informational content of publicly accessible medical podcast data. This dataset, comprising over 4, 300 hours of audio content, was transcribed to generate over 39 million text tokens. Our model, MedPodGPT, integrates the varied di-alogue found in medical podcasts to improve understanding of natural language nuances, cultural contexts, and medical knowledge. Evaluated across multiple benchmarks, MedPodGPT demonstrated an average improvement of 2.31% over standard open-source benchmarks and showcased an improvement of 2.58% in its zero-shot multilingual transfer ability, effectively generalizing to different linguistic contexts. By harnessing the untapped potential of podcast content, MedPodGPT advances natural language processing, offering enhanced capabilities for various applications in medical research and education.

A web-based tool for real-time adequacy assessment of kidney biopsies.

The escalating incidence of kidney biopsies providing insufficient tissue for diagnosis poses a dual challenge, straining the healthcare system and jeopardizing patients who may require rebiopsy or face the prospect of an inaccurate diagnosis due to an unsampled disease. Here, we introduce a web-based tool that can provide real-time, quantitative assessment of kidney biopsy adequacy directly from photographs taken with a smartphone camera. The software tool was developed using a deep learning-driven automated segmentation technique, trained on a dataset comprising nephropathologist-confirmed annotations of the kidney cortex on digital biopsy images. Our framework demonstrated favorable performance in segmenting the cortex via 5-fold cross-validation (Dice coefficient: 0.788±0.130) (n=100). Offering a bedside tool for kidney biopsy adequacy assessment has the potential to provide real-time guidance to the physicians performing medical kidney biopsies, reducing the necessity for re-biopsies. Our tool can be accessed through our web-based platform: http://www.biopsyadequacy.org.