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Dr. Rebecca Mishuris remembers her mother, also a doctor, bringing home her patients' medical charts every night and working on them long after she'd gone to bed. ... But no more. Since last summer, she's been piloting two competing software applications that use large-language models and generative artificial intelligence to listen in on, transcribe and summarize her conversations with patients. At the end of a patient visit it takes her just two to three minutes to review the summary for accuracy, cut and paste a few things into the patient's health record and hit save. (Weintraub, 5/11)

Union leaders and technology experts say health systems should be open with nurses about how they plan to use artificial intelligence and educate them on such tools in light of staffing and other concerns. Hundreds of nurses at Kaiser Permanente and HCA Healthcare protested last month, worried about the systems’ use of AI to measure the severity of patients' illnesses and perform other clinical tasks. The nurses cited concerns about the technology’s potential to put patient safety at risk and cause job losses. (Devereaux, 5/10)

Two years ago, Yiwei Shi was searching desperately for someone to build a drug for her newborn son, Leo. Leo was born with a very small head, a symptom of many severe diseases. After a seizure at two months, doctors sequenced his genome and found a single misspelling in a gene called TNPO2. (Mast, 5/13)

About 10 years ago, a small piece of human brain arrived in the lab of Dr. Jeffrey Lichtman at Harvard. It came directly from an operating room of a nearby hospital, where it was excised from an epilepsy patient undergoing a procedure to reduce her seizures. In the years that followed, Lichtman’s team methodically reconstructed the byzantine wiring patterns of the brain by feeding the 1-cubic-millimeter sample into a $6 million device that sliced it into impossibly-thin slivers. Then, using images of those slivers taken by electron microscopy, they painstakingly recreated the intricate latticework connecting individual cells to one another. (Piore, 5/10)

Interest in mental-health chatbots is rising, fueled by advances in AI’s ability to conduct sophisticated conversations. But how much therapy can they really provide? Chatbots are still no substitute for a human therapist, researchers say. Not only do some of these tools have trouble helping patients in crisis, they don’t always offer a sufficient level of personalization or provide advice that is guaranteed to be accurate. (Wang, 5/12)