NEJM AI Grand Rounds
NEJM AI Grand Rounds, hosted by Arjun (Raj) Manrai, Ph.D. and Andrew Beam, Ph.D., features informal conversations with a variety of unique experts exploring the deep issues at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and medicine. You’ll learn how AI will change clinical practice and healthcare, how it will impact the patient experience, and about the people who are pushing for innovation. Whether you are an AI researcher or a practicing clinician, these conversations will enlighten and surprise you as we journey through this very exciting field. Produced by NEJM Group.
Episodes
Wednesday May 24, 2023
Google’s Exploration of Large Language Models in Medicine
Wednesday May 24, 2023
Wednesday May 24, 2023
Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have proven highly capable of a broad array of natural language tasks including summarizing text, generating prose, and answering questions. This episode’s two guests, Dr. Alan Karthikesalingam and Vivek Natarajan of Google, describe their team’s recent efforts to adapt and evaluate LLMs for clinical applications. Alan and Vivek took very different paths to becoming leading medical AI researchers and in this episode they also share their educational journeys and perspectives on where the field is headed. Alan is a Senior Staff Clinician Scientist and Research Lead at Google Health and Vivek is a Research Scientist at Google Health AI.
Transcript
Wednesday Apr 26, 2023
No Doctor Needed? Dr. Michael Abramoff on the Potential of Autonomous AI
Wednesday Apr 26, 2023
Wednesday Apr 26, 2023
Dr. Michael Abramoff is a renowned ophthalmologist and medical AI pioneer. In this episode, we explore his groundbreaking work that led to the first FDA-authorized device that does not require a physician, IDx-DR, which detects more than mild diabetic retinopathy from digital images of the eye. Dr. Abramoff also reflects on the challenges of commercialization, AI reimbursement, and the ethical imperatives for AI in health care centered around patient benefit. Dr. Abramoff is the Robert C. Watzke Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the University of Iowa and Founder & Executive Chairman of Digital Diagnostics, an autonomous AI diagnostics company that developed IDx-DR.
Transcript
Wednesday Mar 29, 2023
The GPT-4 Episode: Microsoft’s Peter Lee on the Future of Language Models in Medicine
Wednesday Mar 29, 2023
Wednesday Mar 29, 2023
Dr. Peter Lee has shaped computer science from academia, government, and industry. He has chaired a major computer science department, built a new technology office at DARPA, and now serves as Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, where he leads Microsoft Research and its nine worldwide laboratories. In this episode, Peter reveals Microsoft’s interest in health care and the origins of the OpenAI and Microsoft partnership, and he speculates on how large language models like ChatGPT will transform medicine.
Transcript
Wednesday Feb 15, 2023
Dr. Lily Peng: AI for Ophthalmology and the Challenges of AI in the Real World
Wednesday Feb 15, 2023
Wednesday Feb 15, 2023
Dr. Lily Peng has driven major medical AI efforts along the long and arduous path from ideation to deployment. From publishing a landmark study in 2016 presenting an AI model to detect diabetic retinopathy in retinal fundus photographs to evaluating deep learning systems in India and Thailand, she has a unique and wide-ranging perspective on both model development and real-world validation. She continues to lead medical AI efforts as a physician-scientist and the Director of Product Management at Verily.
Transcript
Wednesday Jan 18, 2023
Dr. Pranav Rajpurkar on AI and Radiology
Wednesday Jan 18, 2023
Wednesday Jan 18, 2023
Dr. Pranav Rajpurkar has been at the forefront of medical AI for his entire career. As a graduate student in computer science at Stanford, he created some of the first AI models for radiology and created a suite of datasets and benchmarks that have been widely used by researchers across the world. Now, as a faculty member at Harvard, his group has continued to push the frontier of medical AI across many different specialties including radiology, pathology, and cardiology.
Transcript
Thursday Dec 15, 2022
Dr. Euan Ashley on AI, Genomics, and Cardiology
Thursday Dec 15, 2022
Thursday Dec 15, 2022
Dr. Euan Ashley is a pioneer. In 2010, he led the team that conducted the first clinical interpretation of a human genome, and he holds the record for the world’s fastest genomic diagnosis. He even has a Guinness World Record to prove it. In this wide-ranging discussion, Dr. Ashley shares the stories behind these feats, his experiences applying artificial intelligence to genomics and to cardiology, and his views on whether and how AI will change medicine.
Transcript
Monday Dec 05, 2022
Trailer: Introducing NEJM AI Grand Rounds Podcast
Monday Dec 05, 2022
Monday Dec 05, 2022
[Transcript]
How will AI change clinical practice and healthcare, and how will it impact the patient experience? Who are the people pushing for change and what are their goals? These are just a few of the topics that we hope to explore on NEJM AI Grand Rounds, a new podcast from NEJM Group. This podcast will be an informal conversation with a variety of unique experts exploring the deep issues at the intersection of artificial intelligence and medicine. Whether you are an AI researcher or a practicing clinician, we hope these conversations will enlighten and surprise you as we journey through this very exciting field.
Hi, I’m Raj Manrai. I’m an assistant professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and a co-host of NEJM AI Grand Rounds. I’m fascinated by both the growing abilities of AI and by medical decision making. I am excited about an AI enabled future in medicine that rests on strong clinical evidence.
I’m Andy Beam, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health and cohost. I’ve been interested in AI for as long as I can remember, and I’m so excited that we're starting to see real progress on important medical problems.
NEJM AI Grand Rounds will be launching in mid-December, and we hope you are as excited as we are to have this important discussion. Follow us now on Apple, Spotify, Google, or wherever you find your podcasts.

NEJM AI Grand Rounds
Artificial intelligence has transformed our consumer lives. And it's being increasingly applied to medicine. Medicine presents unique, technical, ethical, and legal questions around both the development and the sustainable deployment of AI. NEJM AI Grand Rounds, a podcast from NEJM Group, explores these topics while providing a forum to discuss evidence and resource sharing alongside debate about the best approaches to integrating AI within the healthcare system. NEJM AI, a new journal in medical artificial intelligence and machine learning, is coming soon from NEJM Group.

Andrew Beam, PhD, is a co-host of the NEJM Group podcast NEJM AI Grand Rounds. Andrew is a longtime AI optimist and is deeply committed to realizing an AI-enabled health care system that works for everyone. Andrew is an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. His lab develops new artificial intelligence methods by combining large-scale deep-learning models with techniques from causal inference to improve the safety and robustness for medical applications. He has a particular interest in using AI to improve neonatal and perinatal outcomes. Outside of the lab, Andrew lives in Waltham, MA, with his wife, Kristyn, a neonatologist and frequent collaborator. They are currently focused on training their largest neural net to date: a three-year-old named Hallie whose entropy maximization algorithm means there is never a shortage of things to clean up!

Arjun “Raj” Manrai, PhD, is a co-host of the NEJM Group podcast NEJM AI Grand Rounds. Raj is an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, where he directs a research lab that works broadly on machine learning and statistical approaches to improve medical decision-making. Focus areas for his group include the clinical use of genomic data and blood laboratory biomarkers, inherited heart disease and kidney disease, decision-making across populations, and reproducibility challenges for medical AI. Raj took the scenic route to medical AI, earning an AB in physics from Harvard College, followed by a PhD in bioinformatics and integrative genomics from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. He resides in the Boston area, and outside work he can usually be found losing home dance competitions to his two young daughters.
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