I cannot express my happiness and excitement about a book I’ve been working on for so long! Here is Your Map to the Future: Learn How to Navigate and Shape What Lies Ahead! In this book, I make science-based futures methods, that only experts including me at The Medical Futurist have been using for decades, accessible to everyone! This heavily illustrated book describes how starting from the traps of short-term thinking and presentism, we can finally expand our time perspective and learn to observe and examine the future as we have been doing with the past. Doing this is crucial in addressing today’s most pressing issues, from climate change to the rise of AI. I cannot wait to hear what you think about it and if you could also leave an Amazon review, that would be fantastic! Thank you! I’m looking forward to beginning this journey with you! Here is the Amazon link: amzn.to/3ZyNHjd

For the first time in my career as a keynote speaker, I opened a presentation with a meme. The one contrasting Elon Musk's predictions about self-driving cars and Geoffrey Hinton's predictions about radiologists becoming obsolete with an image of radiologists driving their regular cars to work in 2026. It was a humorous way to make a serious point: predicting technological progress is one thing. Understanding how it will transform healthcare is quite another. I had the pleasure of delivering a keynote at Bracco Imaging's Innovation Day in Milan, exploring how AI and emerging technologies could transform radiology and medical imaging over the next 5–10 years. The future of medical imaging is about understanding more, predicting earlier, and making better clinical decisions. We explored a fundamental shift: from medical images as snapshots of our health to imaging as a source of predictive, personalized, and actionable insights. It was a fantastic opportunity to challenge assumptions and explore possible futures with Bracco's leadership and innovation teams. Thank you to the Bracco team for the invitation and the engaging discussions! More on my keynotes: medicalfuturist.com/healthca…

I've been saying for years that one of the most exciting aspects of AI is how it can find unusual associations among data points. Now a study further proves that: CT scans reveal much about a patient's health beyond the specific condition they were originally ordered for! Penn Medicine researchers seem to really like video games and English history, as they named their CT AI model Percival. Imagine: a doctor orders a CT scan for a specific reason, and then the department's AI model can find many other things, too. "Percival was found to uncover traces of several chronic conditions, including atrial fibrillation (a form of irregular heartbeat) and chronic kidney disease in scans. Additionally, when compared to a similar AI model called TotalSegmentator, Percival was found to flag conditions like pancreatic cancer, cirrhosis and bacterial pneumonia much more reliably." The source: medicalxpress.com/news/2026-…

AI In The Patient Journey Today! All these examples exist, but maybe not in the same location, for now. AI already plays a role in the lives of over a billion patients. 1) At Home – Morning A skin-checking app 2) On the Road A mental-health chatbot to help calm anxiety during the ride 3) At the Hospital An AI-driven triage chatbot An AI scribe on the phone automatically writes the medical notes in the background An AI radiology tool flags subtle signs that deserve the doctor’s closer look 4) Back Home – Evening A generative-AI translator rewrites the discharge report into plain language The details are here: medicalfuturist.com/ai-in-th…

GLP-1 therapy working better with lifestyle change, and lifestyle change working better with digital interventions? No surprises here. A UK study analyzed GLP-1 therapy through a structured digital program incorporating mandatory biochemical monitoring, weekly video-supported follow-up and clinician-guided dose titration. It worked well! "These findings support the feasibility of delivering structured, digitally enabled obesity pharmacotherapy at scale and provide prospective real-world implementation evidence for this care model. Interpretation is limited by the observational design, absence of a comparator group, self-pay population and 6-month follow-up." Even in the first regulatory documents, it was stated clearly that GLP-1 only works with regular exercise and lifestyle changes in diet. Such habits change more easily with the right digital interventions. Here you go. The study: nature.com/articles/s41591-0…

You train an AI on 40 million facial photographs, and then it can estimate biological age and directly predict survival outcomes of cancer patients from a single selfie! The general idea is that if a cancer patient looks five or more years older than their actual age, they have a 21% higher risk of dying during the average four-year follow-up than the rest of the group. The patients who look five or more years younger had a 17% lower risk. "Each algorithm also relied on distinct parts of the face to make respective predictions of age and mortality risk. FAHR-FaceAge focuses on the creases that run from the sides of the nose down to the corners of the mouth, the forehead area just above the eye sockets, and the temples. FAHR-FaceSurvival, meanwhile, evaluates the region below the eyes and around the nasal bridge." Obviously, it will never be used as a tool to tell patients what to expect before starting a treatment, but then I wonder how it could get deployed in clinical use. The Guardian covered the study: theguardian.com/technology/2… The original study: thelancet.com/journals/landi…

Does the use of advanced technologies favour those who grew up playing video games? Using this dentistry implant drill with its own GPS seems like playing a cool video game. "Meet X-Guide NXT by X-Nav Technologies—a dynamic 3D navigation system that provides real-time guidance while you’re placing dental implants. Instead of relying on a traditional, static surgical guide, X-Guide uses your CBCT-based treatment plan to help you navigate implant placement LIVE." If I were a medical technology company recruiting future experts, I'd definitely watch e-sports games. The channel called theassociatesadvantage shared this video.

OpenEvidence, as a physician-facing LLM, is being used by more healthcare professionals month by month. Now, a study analyzes how almost a million US clinicians use it while submitting 271 million AI-enabled clinical queries! "Early-career physicians (use ratio, 2.54) and those in oncology and hematology (2.00), internal medicine (1.88), and family medicine (1.80) submitted a higher-than-average share of queries; treatment and management accounted for 33.1% of physician queries and diagnosis for 13.9%." I really liked their concluding remark: "For much of modern medicine, clinicians have been expected to internalize a body of knowledge through training and maintain it through continuing education. Study findings suggest a growing share of knowledge access is shifting from recall to retrieval." We cannot expect physicians to know everything, but we can expect them to know where to find the information they need. The study: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam…

There are discussions about how exercise could be prescribed as a treatment, not just an advice. A new study goes further: exercise in itself could be considered. Here is the potential of exerkines as therapeutics. Exercise leads to the release of exerkines, signaling molecules secreted by multiple tissues during physical activity. "We conclude with an assessment of opportunities and strategies for the creation of exerkine-based biomarkers and for using exerkines to facilitate therapeutic discovery. Finally, we present the Exerkine Atlas (exerkineatlas.org/), an open-access web resource integrating curated literature and clinical trial data for all 35 molecules." Feel free to browse the atlas to learn about every exerkine. The paper: annualreviews.org/content/jo…

What if we stopped trying to predict the future of medicine and started thinking about how to shape it? I recently spoke with JMIR Publications about medical futures studies, the methods that can help healthcare leaders prepare for change, and why thinking ahead matters more than ever. Thanks to the JMIR team for the opportunity to discuss this growing field! Read the full interview: blog.jmir.org/beyond-predict…

What is the hype behind AI agents? Is it just new technobabble or is it transformative technology? And what to expect from AI agents in healthcare? I address these questions and more in this article. Read on: medicalfuturist.com/ai-agent…

Simply excellent news from The American Medical Association as they released a new governance framework to ensure the safe and effective use of AI agents in healthcare! A very important and bold step forward, as the whole industry is about to start using a swarm of AI agents in healthcare management. "The framework is based on the principle that for agentic AI solutions to perform clinical functions, they must be backed by evidence and maintain high-quality performance. It provides four questions focused on which tasks AI tools should be allowed to perform and in which situations, as well as who is accountable for the tools’ actions." Here are the 4 questions. What clinical function is the AI performing? What demonstrates that it can perform that function, and what happens if it fails? What should the AI be permitted to do, and under what conditions? Who is responsible for the risks and outcomes? Source: healthcaredive.com/news/ama-…

What do you tell 50 pharmaceutical leaders of a country? 1) That AI is being used for drug design and repurposing at scale. 2) That every international pharma company has an internal LLM to boost repetitive, data-based tasks. 3) That the rising trend of practical longevity creates a new population of patients for them. 4) That they could start sandbox experiments for their employees, giving them synthetic databases to "play" with while learning how to use AI agents. This is what happened this week. "About 50 guests began their day in the beautiful setting of the Duchess Rooftop Bar of the Matild Palace Hotel Budapest, for the 7th Pharma CEO Breakfast by the BBJ and its professional partners, PHOENIX Pharma and BENU." Details: bbj.hu/business/industry/pha…

What Will Blood Testing Look Like In The Near Future? The future of blood testing is likely to see a significant shift from traditional healthcare facilities to at-home testing. DIY blood draw kits and blood-drawing robots promise to make the procedure more efficient while reducing the workload on medical staff. I analyzed it for you here: medicalfuturist.com/what-wil…

Imagine large language models (LLMs) serving as an interface between patients and all the wearable devices they use! A study just proved that it works effectively. "A new AI-driven platform could allow people to interact with their medical devices by sending messages using a smartphone application and receiving feedback in real time. Participants in a proof-of-concept study undergoing monitoring for seizures could ask questions about their brain activity, receive personalized alerts, report symptoms and behaviors, and help train the system to better recognize seizure-related patterns." You wear a health sensor and can ask questions about the data and the insights derived from that, like talking to ChatGPT. This is going to boost the already huge population (around 1 billion people) using health wearables. Source: penntoday.upenn.edu/news/pen…

Are you good at prompt engineering? Great! Now learn context engineering! 'Context engineering is the delicate art and science of filling the context window with just the right information for the next step.” Andrej Karpathy A new BMJ paper discusses how it works, what it means and why it's important for physicians to learn while working with LLMs. Read this brilliant vision from the authors: "Finally, we envision that just as physicians act as mediators between patients and the greater body of medical knowledge and medical tools, physicians may also act as mediators of context: curating what AI models receive and governing what they infer." Source: bmjdigitalhealth.bmj.com/con…

We don't yet know the impact of generative AI on the mental health of medical students. That's why we used scenario analysis to find out the possible ways ahead. Here are 4 distinct scenarios: 1) Analog Happiness (high support and low AI integration), 2) Gen AI Paradise (high support and high integration), 3) Disconnected Struggles (low support and low integration), and 4) Gen AI Takeover (low support and high integration). "Each scenario demonstrates how various institutional responses can impact students’ digital readiness, psychological well-being, and professional growth. For each one, we identified the main systemic risks and suggested immediate institutional measures to address them." Read the study here: mededu.jmir.org/2026/1/e8537…

How wonderful it is to see an advanced technology in action! A few months ago, I shared that the FDA has granted "Skincubator" a so-called Breakthrough Device Designation! The company developed a wearable device designed to enable immediate, prolonged, skin-to-skin care for the tiniest preterm infants in their first days of life. They have already had two clinical trials, with 20 and 9 preterm neonates, respectively. Now a family in Texas could hold their premature twins with the device. I interviewed the company on our Patreon channel: patreon.com/themedicalfuturi… ----- I track developments like this every week. In The Medical Futurist newsletter, I personally select and comment on the 5 most important developments in digital health and AI, for free! If you’d like the next issue in your inbox, you can subscribe here: medicalfuturist.com/newslett…

How do you show an audience something that doesn't exist yet? That's one of the biggest challenges I face when preparing my keynotes about the future of medicine and healthcare. How could generative AI become the interface between physicians and increasingly complex AI technologies? What would a completely redesigned healthcare system look like? How can we use lessons from space exploration to rethink healthcare on Earth? These are abstract concepts, and I believe that visualizing the future is one of the most effective ways to make it understandable. That's why I spend an enormous amount of time designing every visual, illustration, and slide for my keynotes. I want people to understand what I'm talking about, AND actually see the possibilities. Here is a glimpse of the new visual worlds we've been building for my three keynote narratives. More on these keynotes here: medicalfuturist.com/healthca…

The Lancet just published a paper on the top 21st-century global threats to health! And put the paper behind a paywall... "We argue that recent global shocks (including COVID-19, Ebola Bundibugyo virus disease, major geopolitical conflict, accelerating climate impacts, rapid shifts in development assistance, and the emergence of powerful artificial intelligence [AI] systems) show how quickly assumptions about stability can be overturned—and why governments and multilateral institutions must counter short-termism and localism with systematic, repeatable risk assessment and preparedness planning." I remade their key figure to highlight what they found interesting: malicious use of AI as a top threat, for example. The paper: thelancet.com/journals/lance…

We think we always come up with new technologies, yet sometimes those are based on century-old ideas. Just look at this image: "In a 1925 cover story for Science and Invention, US writer Hugo Gernsback describes a device called “The Teledactyl” (from tele, meaning far, and dactyl, meaning finger). The device uses radio transmitters and television screens to allow a doctor to interact with a patient. The added twist – the physician touches the patient using a remotely controlled mechanical hand set up in the patient’s home." Telemedicine has a much longer history than most people realize! 1874: A surgeon in South Australia used the telegraph to provide wound care instructions for a patient nearly 2,000 kilometres away.  1879: A letter published in The Lancet proposed using the telephone to spare patients unnecessary trips to the doctor's office.  1924: Radio News magazine featured a futuristic "Radio Doctor" on its cover, imagining a physician examining a patient through a screen.  The technology keeps changing, but the ambition remains the same: making medical expertise accessible regardless of distance. How amazing it is to witness its evolution!