Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing far more than hospital paperwork. Researchers say it's beginning to help doctors make clinical decisions, identify mental health risks earlier, expand care through smartphones and wearable devices, and extend healthcare to people who might otherwise go without it.
While adoption varies across healthcare systems, Georgia Tech researchers say AI is becoming increasingly integrated into medicine. At the same time, questions about privacy, trust, equity, and human oversight remain central to how the technology will be used in the years ahead.
“Medicine has clearly embraced the human-AI fusion approach,” said Jon Duke, director of the Center for Health Analytics & Informatics at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. “The use of AI is encouraged, but reliance on AI is not.”
From Clinical Workflows to Decision Support
Many of healthcare's earliest AI applications focused on reducing administrative burdens. Today, researchers say the technology is increasingly helping clinicians access and interpret information.
Duke points to the growing use of clinical AI tools such as OpenEvidence, which provide healthcare professionals with AI-generated, source-backed answers to medical questions.
“AI is moving beyond administrative tasks and beginning to play a meaningful role in clinical decision support,” Duke said.
Within electronic health records, AI is being used to generate clinical notes from patient-provider conversations and summarize complex patient charts. While healthcare systems have moved most quickly on efficiency-focused applications, Duke said AI is steadily becoming part of everyday clinical practice.
Still, he believes human oversight will remain essential.
“One of the biggest long-term questions is whether physicians trained alongside AI will develop the same level of independent clinical judgment as previous generations,” he said.
Expanding Access Beyond the Doctor's Office
Researchers also see AI creating new opportunities outside hospitals and clinics.
Munmun De Choudhury, professor in the School of Interactive Computing, said AI is helping public health systems identify emerging mental health concerns by analyzing digital and clinical data.
“AI is enabling public health systems to move from reactive to more proactive approaches by identifying emerging mental health concerns from diverse digital and clinical data sources,” De Choudhury said.
Those insights may create opportunities for earlier intervention.
“AI has the potential to identify subtle behavioral changes that precede worsening mental health, creating opportunities for earlier support before someone reaches a crisis,” she said.
Alexander Adams, assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing, studies wearable sensing systems, remote patient monitoring technologies, and point-of-care health tools. He said advances in AI are accelerating innovation in areas such as pharmaceuticals, medical imaging, simulation, and biomarker discovery.
“The biggest changes I am seeing are the increased productivity in pharmaceuticals, medical imaging, simulation, and biomarker discovery,” Adams said. “That has a downstream impact on what we can measure at the point of care.”
According to Adams, smartphones and wearable devices have become increasingly important healthcare tools because of the amount of data they collect.
“No stand-alone medical devices generate nearly as much data as smartphones and smartwatches, making them a natural place for modern AI,” he said.
He also sees significant potential for AI-enabled technologies to improve access in rural and underserved communities.
“These technologies are especially important for underserved and rural populations that often have less access to care and face higher risks of complications,” Adams said.
Balancing Innovation and Human Connection
Despite growing interest in AI, researchers caution that adoption is not without challenges.
“The real opportunity lies not in building more autonomous AI, but in designing systems that strengthen human judgment, clinical expertise, and community care,” De Choudhury said.
Although AI has advanced rapidly, its impact on chronic disease management has remained limited, said Rosa Arriaga, professor in the School of Interactive Computing.
“AI holds a lot of promise but hasn't delivered much in the way of real-world applications,” Arriaga said.
She also raised concerns about how increased reliance on data-driven tools could affect interactions between clinicians and patients.
“The fear is that clinicians become ‘data checkers’ and have even less interaction with patients,” she said.
At the same time, Arriaga said AI is having its greatest impact in the mental wellness space.
“There are now randomized controlled trials showing that some people are willing to receive ‘therapy’ from an AI agent and that this intervention is beneficial,” she said.
However, she cautioned that those developments should be considered alongside potential risks.
“Greater interactions with AI may lead to greater isolation, and parasocial relationships with AI may erode the social fabric,” Arriaga said.
Shaping the Next Era of Healthcare
Despite differing views on the opportunities and challenges, the researchers see AI becoming a lasting part of healthcare.
“AI is accelerating everything,” Adams said. “Even through rapid iteration and simulation alone, it will accelerate medical devices and point-of-care technologies.”
As healthcare organizations continue to explore where AI can improve care, researchers say the future of medicine will depend not only on technological advances but also on how effectively those tools support the people who deliver and receive care.
Scientists have captured the most detailed structural images to date of a specific type of protein’s DNA repair process. The research could reveal ways to inhibit the effects of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations that heighten the risk for breast, ovarian, and other cancers.
“This work lets us see, step by step, one mechanism by which cancer cells could manage to repair their DNA when BRCA genes mutate and fail,” says study co-author Vicki Wysocki, who is chair of the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “By capturing this process in detail, this study opens the door to understanding how those cancerous cells survive and how treatments might disrupt that mechanism.”
Designated as a Breakthrough Article, the study Mechanism of single-strand annealing from native mass spectrometry and cryo-EM structures of RAD52 homolog Mgm101 was recently published in Nucleic Acids Research.
In addition to Wysocki, who is a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and a professor emerita at Ohio State University, the Georgia Tech research team included co-first author Zihao Qi, a Ph.D. candidate in the Wysocki Lab.
They were joined by Ohio State researchers co-first author Carter Wheat and senior author Charles Bell, who is a professor of biological chemistry and pharmacology in the College of Medicine. Additional authors include Metro High School student Miqdad Hussain and CAS researcher Katerina Zakharova.
Normally, BRCA genes help prevent cancer by acting as tumor suppressors — producing proteins that help repair broken DNA. When cancer cells lack the tumor-suppression function of normal BRCA genes, research has shown that a protein called RAD52 performs DNA repair.
Since RAD52 allows cancer cells to survive and replicate without tumor suppression, researchers have wondered if blocking it would kill the cancerous cells. Blocking RAD52, however, requires fully understanding its repair activities, which have been difficult to capture with even the most sophisticated techniques.
DNA strands break every day in cells, which is why proteins exist to fix the breaks and keep cellular processes running smoothly, the team says. But because repairs must happen quickly and human proteins are often more complex than their ancestral counterparts, even the most advanced imaging equipment can’t capture every step in the process.
In order to understand RAD52 better, the research team turned to its ancestral protein, Mgm101, to observe several key steps in its DNA repair process.
The team decided to leverage multiple types of imaging. Wysocki’s lab at Georgia Tech conducted native mass spectrometry and mass photometry, using light to measure masses of protein-DNA complexes. The results showed that the ancestral protein Mgm101 assembled from a single copy of itself into a large multi-unit ring composed of 19 copies of the protein.
“This ring is essentially a template,” Wysocki explains. “The first strand of DNA can come down, and then the second strand comes on and starts being annealed to the first strand.” Annealing occurs when two single strands of DNA come together to form the characteristic double helix structure.
The findings were supported by what Bell’s lab determined using cryogenic electron microscopy, observing structures floating in solution and frozen in a thin layer of ice.
“RAD52 high-resolution structures have been determined with single-stranded DNA, but not with the two DNAs that it’s trying to anneal,” Bell says. “Its job is to bind single-stranded DNA and anneal it to its complement sequence. It’s been captured structurally, but only in a few states relevant to the reaction.”
“Here, we have more of the states along the full pathway from substrate, to intermediate and product. And the duplex intermediate is a conformation that’s never been seen before.”
Previously, researchers were unsure if this DNA repair process used one protein ring or two rings working together, the team says. Their findings show that just one ring is used — and that this is likely consistent across different species.
Next, the team plans to try capturing the same phases of the DNA repair process with RAD52 from humans. A clearer understanding of how this family of proteins binds to DNA strands and coaxes them back together after a break provides insights for drug targets that could halt the process in cancer cells empowered by mutated BRCA genes, they say.
“It’s still a proposed mechanism: Just because we see these snapshots of the process doesn’t mean we know all the details, but we do have the best snapshots for any protein that does this single-strand annealing,” says Bell. “This focuses our strategies for drug development.”
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkag320
Funding: This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. The cryo-EM data were collected at Ohio State’s Center for Electron Microscopy and Analysis and processed using the Ohio Supercomputer Center.
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Georgia Tech College of Sciences
]]>For many of these patients, care has long meant pain and disfigurement alongside other severe side effects, rather than receiving treatment that addresses the disease itself. This new ARPA-H award marks a potential turning point.
Lead researcher Susan Napier Thomas, Woodruff Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Parker H. Petit Institute of Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB), has collaborated with her colleague J. Brandon Dixon, Woodruff Professor in the Woodruff School and IBB, for more than a decade on this project. The research partners are driven by the lack of meaningful treatment options available to patients.
“Funding support at this level is unprecedented,” Thomas said. “It finally gives us a chance to move beyond symptom management and toward real treatment. We’re addressing an underserved population with a huge unmet need.”
The lymphatic system helps keep fluid moving through the body and plays a key role in immune health. When it does not function properly, fluid can build up in tissues, causing chronic pain and other long-term complications. Thomas noted that despite its toll on patients, lymphatic disease has lagged decades behind cardiovascular care in both treatment and research investment.
“We are excited about this groundbreaking project in lymphatic engineering,” said Andrés García, IBB executive director. “By uniting interdisciplinary expertise, this work addresses long-standing challenges in lymphatic disease and moves meaningful solutions closer to the patients who need them most.”
In the coming years, Thomas, Dixon, and their research partners will work toward an initial human trial, with an early focus on rare lymphatic conditions in children, as well as chronic disease in adults.
“This award reflects Georgia Tech’s growing leadership in using engineering to solve some of healthcare’s biggest challenges,” said Carolyn Seepersad, Eugene C. Gwaltney Jr. School Chair and professor in the Woodruff School. “It reinforces the Institute’s role in advancing innovations that improve patient care and strengthen Georgia’s position as a hub for health technology and biomedical innovation.”
The award was made through ARPA-H’s Groundbreaking Lymphatic Interventions and Drug Exploration (GLIDE) program led by Dr. Kimberley Steele.
This research was funded, in part, by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) under Agreement No. 1AY2AX000137-01. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. government.
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