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Microsoft's model catalog Courtesy of Microsoft

Roughly 80% of hospital and health system visits include an imaging exam because doctors often rely on images to help treat patients. Microsoft is launching a collection of open-source multimodal AI models that can analyze data types beyond just text, such as medical images, clinical records and genomic data. Health-care organizations can use the models to build new applications and tools. For example, digitizing a single pathology slide can require more than a gigabyte of storage, so many existing AI pathology models have trained on small pieces of slides at a time. Microsoft and Providence Health & Services built a whole-slide model that improves on mutation prediction and cancer subtyping, according to a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature. Now, health systems can build on it and fine-tune it to meet their needs. "Getting a whole-slide foundation model for pathology has been a challenge in the past … and now we're actually able to do it," Sara Vaezy, chief strategy and digital officer at Providence, told CNBC in an interview. "It was really sort of a game changer." The models are available in the model catalog within Azure AI Studio, which serves as Microsoft's generative AI development hub. Health-care agent service

Microsoft's health-care agent service. Courtesy of Microsoft

Microsoft also announced a new way for health systems to build AI agents. AI agents vary in complexity, but they can help users answer questions, automate processes and perform specific tasks. Through Microsoft Copilot Studio, these organizations can create agents equipped with health-care-specific safeguards. When an answer contains a reference to clinical evidence, for instance, the source is shown, and a note indicates if the answer is AI-generated. Fabrications and omissions are also flagged, Microsoft said. For example, a health-care organization could build an AI agent to help doctors identify relevant clinical trials for a patient. Microsoft said a physician could type the question, "What clinical trials for a male 55-year-old with diabetes and interstitial lung disease?" and receive a list of potential options. It would save the doctor the time and effort of finding each trial. AI agents that can help patients answer basic questions have been popular among the health systems that have already begun testing the service, Hadas Bitran, general manager of health AI at Microsoft Health and Life Sciences, said in a Q&A with reporters. Agents that can help doctors answer questions about recent guidelines and patients' history are also common, she added. Microsoft's health-care agent service is available in a preview capacity starting Thursday. Bringing automated documentation to nurses

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