Artificial intelligence (AI) tools to boost people’s health gained traction in 2025, promising to personalise medical care, speed up diagnoses, aid the discovery of new medicines, and more.
Finland, for example, is using AI to train health workers, while Estonia is applying it to medical data analysis, and Spain is using AI for disease detection.
Yet research indicates AI shouldn’t replace medical professionals anytime soon: Doctors still outperform AI in emergency settings, and AI chatbots struggle to address mental healthproblems and risk spreading medical misinformation.
There are also major safety concerns, with tech and counter-terrorism experts warning that extremists could co-opt AI tools to create bioweapons capable of sparking a pandemic.
Even so, AI is increasingly finding its way into the medical field. Here are five ways it’s changed Europeans’ health and wellbeing this year.
Scientists developed an AI model that can predict more than 1,000 medical conditions– including certain cancers, heart attacks, and diabetes – more than a decade before someone is formally diagnosed.
While it isn’t yet ready to be used in doctors’ offices, the tool could help researchers understand how diseases develop over time.
Meanwhile, other AI tools launched this year to predict whether rare genetic mutationswill lead to disease, to forecast women’s heart health risks by analysing their mammograms, and to use routine medical scans to identify biomarkers of chronic stress.
In a European first, an AI assistant called Prof. Valmed was certified this year to help doctors with diagnosis and treatment, aided by a vast trove of patient medical data.
Other diagnostic tools are also on the horizon. In the United Kingdom, for example, researchers said an AI-powered stethoscope can detect heart conditions in just 15 seconds.
The stethoscope was somewhat too sensitive, given that further testing ruled out heart failure for about two-thirds of patients flagged by the stethoscope. However, the researchers said the tool also found genuine heart problems that might otherwise have gone undetected.
Also in the UK, doctors are using AI to save patients weeks of waiting for a prostate cancer diagnosis.
The AI tool analyses medical imaging scans and identifies patients at high risk for prostate cancer, which sends them to the front of the queue for a radiologist to review.
A German research team used AI to automate the process of monitoring patients who have had coronary stents implanted into open blood vessels that were blocked due to heart disease. Typically, tracking the healing process is time-consuming and can lead to other complications.
The AI-powered algorithm uses blood vessel imaging to analyse how well patients are healing and is able to quickly distinguish between different healing patterns with a similar level of accuracy to expert clinicians. The researchers said the tool could help standardise stent monitoring and boost heart health.
Scientists are using AI to fight antibiotic-resistant superbugs, which pose a growing public health threat across Europe.
Over the next three years, they plan todevelop an AI model to design and test new treatments for drug-resistant bacteria, and will use AI to better understand how the immune system responds to another type of bacteria as they search for an effective vaccine.
Doctors’ offices and hospitals across Europe are adopting AI tools to help them manage administrative tasks such as note-taking and referrals. The goal is to give doctors more time with patients amid growing health worker shortages and immense pressures on staff.
Microsoft made its AI clinical assistant available in Ireland this year, for example, while Sweden’s Tandem Health launched its AI-powered medical scribe in Spain, Germany, the UK, and Finland. It also operates in the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark.