Technology

Top Medical Lab Now Uses AI To Help Diagnose Patients

Wikimedia Commons/Public/Jernej Furman from Slovenia, CC BY 2.0

A major medical laboratory joined the growing list of companies in the healthcare system to rely on artificial intelligence services.

Arkana Labs — an Arkansas-based laboratory specializing in Kidney disease pathology — partnered with Anthropic’s AI agent Claude to turn 25 years of its kidney-biopsy archives and nearly three million slides into data for training AI diagnosis models, according to a news story featured on Claude’s website since at least Sept. 25, as per Internet Archive.

“We want today’s biopsies to teach us enough to rewrite the clinical process itself, catching disease before a biopsy is ever needed and moving up the chain toward drug discovery,” Owen Parker, Arkana’s Chief Technology Officer said in the article. “That’s the ultimate goal.”

Despite a Sept. 25 federal court decision allowing the Pentagon to keep labeling Claude a “supply chain risk” to national security, and concerns over rogue AI, civilian agencies continue to adopt Anthropic’s AI conversational assistant and authorize increased access to healthcare records.

Arkana made the initial announcement of the partnership between its lab and Anthropic on X on August 11.

Representatives from Anthropic and Arkana Labs each did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.

One hundred sixty biopsy cases come through Arkana Labs every morning from different hospital systems nationwide, and about 65 percent of all testing for kidney disease in the country takes place at the facility, the story on Claude’s website said.

Every kidney biopsy comes with extensive paperwork that trained technicians used to pour over by hand. Now, the records are run through Claude’s infrastructure where the AI system not only runs the diagnosis but refers where the findings should be sent to. Claude boasts an accuracy reading between 97 percent and 98 percent according to their listed numbers in the news story.

“You’re not waiting seven days, you’re not waiting five days,” Owen Parker, Arkana’s Chief Technology Officer said in the article. “You know you’re going to have an answer the day after you have a biopsy.”

Using AI to process samples reportedly will save the laboratory time and money, as most samples are processed before a patient’s insurance claims come through, Parker shared in the report.

“We end up eating a lot of cost as a result,” Parker said in the article. “But we need to process everything that comes through the door because somebody needs it on the other end.”

The article shared that Claude is also being used to develop Arkana’s lab information system, with the goal of exceeding the number of cases processed each day.

Sadie Clark, Arkana’s AI Enablement Lead, heads-up a seven-week course equipping physicians and researchers employed at the lab to build their own Claude tools for their work, the story also said.

“It used to be: I don’t know if we can do this because we don’t have the capabilities. Now it’s: let’s look at it and explore, because if we don’t, that’s the more reckless option,” Clark said in the article.