OMU News

Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, renowned medical science journal The Lancet introduced a publication focused on everything digital in relation to health. Since The Lancet Digital Health’s inception in 2019, it has been led by Dr. Rupa Sarkar, the editor-in-chief, who visited the OMU medical school on March 27, 2025.

Dr. Sarkar gave a presentation on artificial intelligence and clinical care to about 40 members of the public in Osaka, mainly from the OMU hospital and Abeno Campus community, during an event organized by Associate Professor Daiju Ueda and Graduate School of Medicine colleagues.

At the start of the event, Dean Daisuke Tsuruta welcomed Dr. Sarkar, mentioning that the “convergence of AI and medical science” is “particularly meaningful.”

During her presentation, Dr. Sarkar gave an overview of her publication, when early articles were run about COVID-19, to the present, where 80-90% of submissions are on AI, and of these, about half are on generative AI.

Among such articles selected for publication are two papers (see links below) by Dr. Ueda’s Department of Artificial Intelligence, and Dr. Sarkar spoke about them in the context of “opportunistic AI.” The AI models in the research used existing chest x-rays, of which data sources are plentiful as probably everyone in the world has had such images taken, “to support clinical pathologies,” she said. Such opportunistic AI could perhaps supplement the regular diagnostic approach to help identify serious diseases.

Amid the mass influx of medical research into the emerging AI field, however, come increasing challenges.

In one section of her presentation titled “AI – Hope or Hype?” she cautioned that there remains a lack of “infrastructure and regulations to incorporate AI effectively into clinical medicine.”

She wrapped up her presentation by focusing on the future directions for AI, looking into positive aspects of generative AI and large language models that can help fulfill The Lancet’s objectives of health equity, understanding health disparities, and responding to health crises.

OMU research published in The Lancet Digital Health

• A deep learning-based model to estimate pulmonary function from chest x-rays: multi-institutional model development and validation study in Japan　(August 2024)
  https://doi.org/10.1016/s2589-7500(24)00113-4
• Artificial intelligence-based model to classify cardiac functions from chest radiographs: a multi-institutional, retrospective model development and validation study 　(August 2023)
  https://doi.org/10.1016/s2589-7500(23)00107-3

Contact

Global Strategy Division
Email：gr-glo-strategy[at]omu.ac.jp
*Please change [at] to @.