Physician in the Loop

Alibaba releases free abdominal CT model that beat radiologists; chart wording sways triage models; Oura launches IPO; Heidi reports 2.8 million visits a week

Show Notes

Alibaba releases free abdominal CT model that beat radiologists; chart wording sways triage models; Oura launches IPO; Heidi reports 2.8 million visits a week

The voices on this episode are generated, and so is the script, from the day's post at Physician in the Loop. Every fact in the post links to its source.

Read the post and its sources

Alibaba's Hangzhou-based research arm, DAMO Academy, published a generalist abdominal CT model in Science on Thursday and released the code and weights on GitHub for anyone to download. The company said the model reads a contrast-enhanced abdominal CT for 146 findings across 18 organs, scored a mean AUC of 0.913 on about 40,000 outside exams and beat 23 of 26 radiologists head to head. The figures are the company's own, reviewed by Science; the model was validated on Chinese patients only and has no clearance from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or any other regulator. Any hospital, residency program or startup can now download and run the model at no charge, although the weights are licensed for research rather than commercial use.

Two papers in npj Digital Medicine addressed language and authorship in clinical AI. Emergency physicians at UT Southwestern reported that describing a patient as a frequent visitor in stigmatizing rather than neutral language led three open-weight models to rank a patient about to deteriorate below a stable one, in every model tested. A St. Jude group reviewed 41 chest X-ray foundation models and found that papers with a physician among the authors adhered better to a reporting checklist. Separately, Oura launched its initial public offering on Monday morning, 50 million shares at $40 to $44 on the Nasdaq, with a prospectus that describes a wellness product rather than a medical device and does not mention the physicians to whom the company began routing members two weeks ago.

In this episode

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How technological innovation is changing medicine for patients and the people who practice on the front lines.

Nora: This is Physician in the Loop, the daily briefing on AI in medicine. I'm Nora Davis.

James: And I'm James Hudson. It's Monday, September 21st, 2026.

Nora: A model anyone can download for free just beat 23 of 26 radiologists reading abdominal CT scans.

James: Free, no license fee, today?

Nora: Today. Alibaba's DAMO Academy published it in Science on Thursday and put the code and weights on GitHub, and it still has no FDA clearance anywhere.

James: Sounds like a story with some fine print.

Nora: I've got that one, plus Oura's IPO filing and the physicians it's quietly routing members to.

James: I've got a study on how stigmatizing language changes AI triage, and Heidi's new numbers on how many visits its scribe covers a week.

Nora: So, the DAMO model. It reads a contrast-enhanced abdominal CT and checks for 146 findings across 18 organs, cancers included.

James: That's a lot to screen in one pass. What did they train it on?

Nora: More than 400,000 contrast-enhanced abdominal CT exams paired with their reports, and about 15 million anatomy-tagged image-text pairs, according to the GitHub page.

James: And how did it actually perform?

Nora: South China Morning Post reported a mean AUC of 0.913 across those 146 findings, tested on nearly 40,000 real exams from eight outside centers. It beat 23 of 26 radiologists head to head.

James: What happens when a radiologist uses it as help instead of a rival?

Nora: TechTimes reported about 10 points of sensitivity gained, and reads more than 30% faster.

James: Could a hospital just run this tomorrow, then?

Nora: The code is Apache 2.0, but the weights are licensed for research only, not commercial use. And it was validated on Chinese patients only, no prospective trial anywhere.

James: And the Federal Register published a final order Thursday. Every radiology detection or triage algorithm still needs its own 510(k) clearance from the FDA, open weights or not.

Nora: So download it, study it, but don't deploy it.

James: Now the language study. Emergency physicians at UT Southwestern built patient pairs matched on Emergency Severity Index, one patient deteriorating within six hours, one not.

Nora: And they ran that through more than one model?

James: Gemma, Qwen and DeepSeek, across 221,556 comparisons. Stigmatizing language about frequent emergency department use pushed the deteriorating patient down the list, in every model, by as much as 9.4%.

Nora: Did neutral wording fix that?

James: Neutral phrasing scored 1.4 to 7.1 points higher, according to the paper in npj Digital Medicine.

Nora: What about other attributes, psychiatric history, race?

James: Psychiatric history moved rankings by up to 9.5%, but only reached significance in one model. Race, language and insurance showed no consistent harm.

Nora: So the authors think the wording itself is the problem?

James: They concluded the wording of the input is a safety-critical design choice.

Nora: That tracks with Thursday's post, the model that scored identical presentations as less severe when the patient was female.

James: Same theme, different attribute. How you describe a patient changes what the model decides.

Nora: Oura launched its IPO Monday morning. 50 million shares, priced at $40 to $44, on the Nasdaq under the symbol OURA.

James: Who's actually selling those shares?

Nora: 13.5 million shares from the company itself, 36.5 million from existing holders. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan are leading the deal.

James: What's that worth?

Nora: At the midpoint, about $2.1 billion. That's less than the $3 billion deal at a valuation above $16 billion that Bloomberg reported in August, per Investing.com.

James: What do the underlying numbers look like?

Nora: The S-1 shows 5.0 million paid members as of June 30, revenue of $1.21 billion over nine months. Hardware brought in $974 million, membership $240 million, up 74%, and net income for the period was $60.8 million.

James: Any word on who's wearing the ring?

Nora: Fierce Healthcare reported the demographics: about 72% women, 27% over 45.

James: Does the filing mention any of the medical features we've covered before?

Nora: It describes an AI health companion called Oura Advisor and custom health LLMs, and calls the product a general wellness item it believes isn't subject to FDA device rules.

James: But it doesn't mention Counsel Health.

Nora: Not once. Even though Oura members have been able to reach Counsel's physicians inside the app since September 17, per Fierce Healthcare.

James: Heidi's Asia-Pacific chief medical information officer, Darran Foo, told the HIMSS Asia-Pacific meeting the company's ambient scribe now supports 2.8 million patient visits a week, across 190 countries and 110 languages.

Nora: Any hard result behind that number?

James: One example: a New Zealand emergency department cut documentation time from 17 minutes to four per patient.

Nora: Was that published anywhere?

James: No. That's a vendor figure from a conference stage, unaudited, and no study was cited for it.

Nora: What about the survey they released?

James: Heidi surveyed 1,823 clinicians across 25 countries in July. 86% said they use AI daily or several times a week.

Nora: Any policy behind that use?

James: 83% said they do it with no employer guidance and no formal policy. 68% named hallucination as their top concern.

Nora: That 83% lines up with the Imprivata survey we covered on September 15, where 72% of health system leaders reported AI deployed without IT approval.

James: Different surveys, same gap. Clinicians are already using this every day, and most workplaces still haven't written the policy for it.

Nora: Sources and corrections are at physicianintheloop.org. I'm Nora Davis.

James: I'm James Hudson. See you tomorrow.