How Far Can AI Go in Medicine?

How Far Can AI Go in Medicine?

As a young pathologist, Riyad El-Khoury spent long days hunched over a microscope—an intense, repetitive craft where fatigue is part of the job. Today, as associate professor of pathology and head of the Muhieddine Al-Ahdab Neuromuscular Diagnostic Laboratory at the American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC), he’s helping push pathology into a new era: AI-assisted diagnosis. In this episode, El-Khoury explains why the first big shift is going digital—turning glass slides into high-resolution images that AI can analyze at scale—and why the next leap may be even bigger: prediction. He also explores a provocative possibility: a future where AI moves beyond assistance and, in some workflows, operates autonomously—raising urgent questions about bias, generalizability, interpretability, and what it will take to build systems that are safe, equitable, and worthy of clinical trust.

Can Collective Recovery Endure?

What happens when a disaster hits—and the state can’t (or won’t) respond? In this episode, urban studies professor Mona Harb, co-founder of the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut, takes us inside Beirut’s post–port explosion recovery through the lens of “urban commoning”: the collective creation, repair, and shared management of urban spaces and resources outside state control. From Nation Station—a community hub born in an abandoned gas station—to a citywide ecosystem of organizers, nonprofits, faith-based networks, professional teams, political actors, and diaspora-led initiatives, Harb’s research traces how communities became de facto urban governors. But the episode also explores the limits: why some efforts stalled under politics, property disputes, donor constraints, and neighborhood tensions—and what it would take for urban commons to endure.

How Crisis Conditions Shape Preterm Birth

Dr. Charafeddine explains why parental mental health is not “extra”—it’s part of the care plan. Babies need nurturing caregivers to thrive, and caregivers need psychological, emotional, and social support to provide that care. While robust services like counseling, home visits, and referral pathways are often limited, costly, or inaccessible in fragile contexts, low-resource practices can still make a meaningful difference. We explore approaches like kangaroo care (skin-to-skin contact) and family-centered developmental care, and why strengthening the “ecosystem” around parents is foundational to improving outcomes for preterm infants.

Turning Tires into a Valuable Energy Resource

In this episode, we talk with Joseph Zeaiter, professor at the American University of Beirut (Baha and Walid Bassatne Department of Chemical Engineering and Advanced Energy), whose team is working to reframe tire waste as a resource. His latest research explores a practical, scalable idea: using an inexpensive mineral-based catalyst—a nickel- and cerium-doped zeolite—to dramatically increase the amount of hydrogen and syngas you can recover during the recycling/treatment process.

Turning a Phone Camera into a 3D Mapper

AUB’s Daniel Asmar explains MGSO, a new system that turns a single phone camera into a real-time 3D mapper. It builds dense, photorealistic maps at ~30 fps using “Gaussian splats,” enabling AR, robotics, and everyday apps without special sensors.