NASA tests AI medic for astronauts too far from Earth to call a doctor
NASA researchers are testing an AI clinical decision support system to help astronauts diagnose and treat medical symptoms during deep-space missions.
The Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA) is powered by a Red Hat-backed open source tool called RamaLama, designed to simplify how developers run, pull, and serve AI models. While it's no Star Trek-esque Emergency Medical Hologram (EMH) quite yet, it could be a boon to ailing astros far from home.
Earlier this year, NASA decided to bring Crew-11 back from the International Space Station (ISS) early because of a medical concern. As missions venture further afield – to the Moon, Mars, and beyond – an early return may no longer be practical, while communication delays can rule out real-time consultation with doctors on Earth.
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Red Hat says that CMO-DA started life as a proof of concept before moving from a cloud-dependent model to a fully disconnected edge deployment. It currently runs on a terrestrial twin of the HPE Spaceborne Computer aboard the ISS.
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Inference is multimodal. "RamaLama provides the engine to run both large language models (LLMs) for complex medical reasoning and Vision Language Models (VLMs) for image-based symptom analysis," Red Hat stated. "This allows the CMO-DA to process both text and visual data without needing a massive infrastructure footprint."
CMO-DA runs locally on the device, which means responses do not depend on a connection to Earth.
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That said, the system has yet to leave Earth. Testing on the Spaceborne twin allows the system to be refined before any potential deployment to the ISS. "Once validated on Earth, the CMO-DA will be demonstrated to NASA leadership so that they can evaluate its further use," Red Hat said.
HPE's Spaceborne project is on its third iteration aboard the ISS. Built from off-the-shelf components, the system is based on HPE Edgeline and Proliant servers and is more than capable of machine learning and AI workloads.
In the future, the team plans to integrate Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI for the next iteration of the CMO-DA.
Sadly, there appears to be no chance of a virtual Robert Picardo turning up to dispense medical advice to stricken astronauts. ®
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