Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare: A Successful Integration
On September 25, 2025, the University of Montpellier brought together the academic community and its partners for a day dedicated to the theme “AI and Health: Global Health in the Age of AI.” The goal was to explore advances, challenges, experimental frameworks, and concrete solutions in the areas of education, research, and innovation. This exploration is already well underway in Montpellier, as evidenced by the numerous projects combining AI and health.
Several hundred people gathered on September 25 at the Institute of Botany to explore the close ties between AI and healthcare—ties that have long existed in Montpellier. Indeed, there has always been a strong desire for collaboration between the AI and healthcare sectors in Montpellier, and if the “UM ” is now at the forefront of these fields, it is because they have since converged.
A long tradition
In the field of research, this long tradition of interdisciplinary collaboration between digital technology and health has already taken shape in numerous projects, as evidenced, for example, by the long-term thematic project“Understanding and Acting for Living Systems,”which aims to expand collaborations and synergies within the MIPS cluster through the study of living systems—in both basic and applied research—as they relate to issues in biology, health, agricultural sciences, and ecological and environmental sciences.
At Lirmm, artificial intelligence and healthcare also converge in the field of medical robotics through the Tirrex platform—a technological infrastructure for cutting-edge robotics research—where AI plays a key role in driving new advancements in existing medical devices as well as developing new intelligent technological solutions for the surgery of the future.
At the IRCM, researcher Stéphanie Nougaret is using AI to “digitize” cancer through a research project she is developing to implement a new approach to the imaging of cancerous lesions—an effort that has earned her the highly prestigious Starting Grant awarded by the European Council for Research.
Broad spectrum
The topics addressed in the fields of AI and health within the research units of the “UM ” cover a broad spectrum. At Idesp, for example, the Inria Prémédical project team is composed of researchers in statistics, machine learning, and AI, as well as clinicians. These diverse professionals specialize in developing precision medicine methods using causal learning and federated learning, which, among other things, help ensure the confidentiality of medical data. This research aims to accelerate the market launch of targeted drugs and to deploy decision-support algorithms.
The healthcare sector is indeed facing an ever-increasing volume of medical data, and healthcare professionals are becoming increasingly dependent in their practice on the quality of the design and configuration of digital tools. To address this volume of data, theUM, the University Hospital (CHU), and the company Dedalus launched a project in 2022 led by the ISDM for theUM , and by Erios (Center for Research and Integration of Digital Tools in Healthcare) at the CHU.
High-Performance Analytics
AI enables major innovations in healthcare, particularly in the field of personalized medicine, which requires an understanding of the specific characteristics of a disease to better treat patients by deciphering the thousands of mutations scattered throughout our DNA sequences. This is the foundation of the startup SeqOne Genomics, co-funded by theUM, which offers high-performance genomic data analysis solutions for personalized medicine, with the goal of improving clinical care for patients with cancer and rare and hereditary diseases.
While this research highlights the connections between AI and healthcare, these links are just as strong in education, as demonstrated, for example, by the decision to establish a junior professorship (CPJ) UM in artificial intelligence within the PhyMedExp laboratory. Zubeyir Salis, who holds this CPJ, helped create a new specialized course designed for this year’s medical and midwifery students at the Montpellier-Nîmes Faculty of Medicine, which is structured around two course modules of 12 hours each.
Better-Educated Students
Generative AI is also used to train and assess medical students’ skills through the Doc Simulator simulation program, funded by theUM and designed by Kevin Yauy, a medical geneticist and artificial intelligence specialist at theUM and the Montpellier University Hospital, who won a NextGen Leaders in Health award. The tool’s effectiveness has already been demonstrated, as students trained on the simulator perform better on structured objective clinical exams.
As early as 2023, theUM had established itself in this field with the opening of the ESNbyUM digital health school, which trains future healthcare professionals as well as lawyers, engineers, and administrative staff in health data, cybersecurity, digital health tools, telehealth, and health communication.
All of these projects and initiatives are just the tip of the iceberg, reflecting a strong local policy that has made this successful integration of AI and healthcare in Montpellier possible.
The “IA Montpellier Méditerranée” association, a new major player in the field of artificial intelligence
On Thursday, September 25, the Occitanie region, Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole, the University of Montpellier, the Montpellier University Hospital, Digital 113, and French Tech Méditerranée joined forces to create the “IA Montpellier Méditerranée” association and pursue a bold vision for artificial intelligence in Montpellier and the Occitanie region. Announced last February, this project is rooted in both the mathematical and computational foundations of artificial intelligence, but also serves as a tool that has become indispensable in the fields of life sciences and the environment.