As manned space missions become longer and longer and farther from the earth, ensuring the health of astronauts becomes more and more challenging. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station can rely on live calls to Houston, regular shipments of medicines and rapid transportation back home six months later. But that may all change soon, as NASA and its commercial partners, such as Elon Musk's SpaceX, seek to launch longer crewed missions to the moon and Mars.
This looming reality is prompting NASA to gradually make on-orbit medical care more "Earth-independent." One early experiment is a proof-of-concept AI medical assistant developed by NASA in partnership with Google. The tool, called the Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA), is designed to help astronauts diagnose and treat symptoms without a doctor or loss of communication with Earth.
The multimodal tool includes speech, text and images and runs on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI environment.
David Cruley, an account engineer at Google's public sector business unit, said the project operates using Google's public sector fixed-price subscription agreement, which covers the cost of cloud services, application development infrastructure and model training. NASA owns the source code for the application and helped fine-tune the model. The Google Vertex AI platform provides access to Google and other third-party models.
Two institutions put CMO-DA through three conditions: ankle injury, low back pain, and earache. Three doctors, one of whom was an astronaut, rated the assistant's performance on initial assessment, history taking, clinical reasoning and treatment.
The trio found high diagnostic accuracy, with the assessment and treatment plan correct 74 percent of the time for low back pain; 80 percent correct for earache; and 88 percent correct for ankle injuries.
The roadmap is intentionally incremental. NASA scientists said in a slide that they plan to add more data sources, such as medical devices, and train the model to increase "situational awareness," or to adapt to conditions unique to space medicine, such as microgravity.
Crowley didn't specify whether Google plans to seek regulatory approval to bring the medical assistant into doctors' offices here on Earth, but if the model is proven in orbit, it could be Google's next step.
Not only could the tool improve astronaut health in space, "but the lessons learned from this tool can be applied to other areas of health as well," he said.