AP and Lateral

Medical AI, held to the light.

Radiograph of a lumbar spine, front viewAP
Radiograph of the same lumbar spine, side viewLAT

A weekly brief on medical AI in the Middle East, written for clinicians. Every story is shown in two views - what was announced, and the angle it leaves out.

Issue 1, week to 12 November 2026

This issue in one minute

  1. Every doctor in Abu Dhabi now has an AI assistant inside the shared patient record
  2. Abu Dhabi launches an AI Clinician Framework and a Trusted Research Environment
  3. Saudi National Guard hospitals take Lunit's chest X-ray and mammography AI
  4. ART Fertility Clinics and Conceivable to explore robotic, AI-assisted IVF
  5. Digital pathology and AI in Saudi Arabia held back by cost, workforce and data, review finds
  6. Models know more Arabic medicine than they can say
  7. MedAraBench tests models on 24,883 Arabic medical exam questions across 19 specialties
Riyadh Abu Dhabi
Where this issue's stories come from: Abu Dhabi 4, Saudi Arabia 2.

This week 4 stories

Abu Dhabi, deployment

Every doctor in Abu Dhabi now has an AI assistant inside the shared patient record

AP - what was announced

The Department of Health and M42's Abu Dhabi Health Data Services have added an AI assistant to Malaffi, the emirate's health information exchange. It summarises a patient's history and answers a doctor's questions about it. Malaffi holds data on more than 14 million patients, and the rollout covers the whole emirate. M42 launched its own clinical AI platform, Ossi, with Microsoft in October. The announcement does not say which model powers the Malaffi assistant.

Lateral - the other view

A language model is now summarising records for a whole population at the point of care. If a summary leaves out an allergy or an anticoagulant, a patient can be harmed. M42 has promised an evaluation with clinicians, and until it reports nobody outside can say how often that happens.

Not disclosedThe model behind it, accuracy or error rates, time saved, uptake, and when M42's promised evaluation with clinicians will report.

Sources: tbreak, DH Arab, The National on Ossi

Abu Dhabi, regulation

Abu Dhabi launches an AI Clinician Framework and a Trusted Research Environment

AP - what was announced

Both were launched by the Department of Health at the Abu Dhabi Future Health Summit, according to its round-up published on 11 November. The summit drew more than 17,300 visitors from 85 countries. The framework is meant to guide research and prepare the ground for regulating AI that practises with autonomy. The research environment allows work on health and genomic data inside a secure setting. The department also signed with Isomorphic Labs on AI drug discovery.

Lateral - the other view

Abu Dhabi is writing rules for AI that practises with autonomy before such systems arrive. It is worth reading if you are planning a clinical AI study in the Gulf.

Source: Abu Dhabi Media Office

Saudi Arabia, imaging

Saudi National Guard hospitals take Lunit's chest X-ray and mammography AI

AP - what was announced

Lunit will supply INSIGHT CXR and INSIGHT MMG to the Ministry of National Guard Health Affairs. solutions by stc is the systems integrator, and results will appear inside the existing PACS. Lunit signed with Dr. Sulaiman Al Habib Medical Group in 2023, so this moves it from private providers into a government system.

Lateral - the other view

Radiologists use a tool when it sits inside the PACS they already work in, so the next question is how it performs on Saudi patients.

Not disclosedContract value, number of licences and the deployment schedule.

Sources: Lunit release, Korea Biomedical Review

Abu Dhabi, fertility

ART Fertility Clinics and Conceivable to explore robotic, AI-assisted IVF

AP - what was announced

The two signed a memorandum of understanding at the summit. It covers laboratory infrastructure, workflow, staff training, and the validation and regulatory steps needed before any deployment.

Lateral - the other view

So far this is an agreement to explore. The laboratory work, validation and regulatory steps it lists all have to happen before a patient is treated this way.

Source: Healthcare MEA

Research watch 3 papers

Saudi Arabia, pathology

Digital pathology and AI in Saudi Arabia held back by cost, workforce and data, review finds

AP - what was published

An open-access review published on 4 November maps what stands between Saudi laboratories and routine AI-assisted histopathology. It is a synthesis of existing literature and reports no new experiments.

Lateral - the other view

It is useful as a list of the obstacles. With no new experiments, it cannot tell you whether these tools work on Saudi slides.

Sources: the paper (DOI), Bioengineer.org summary

UAE, language models

Models know more Arabic medicine than they can say

AP - what was published

A team from New York University Abu Dhabi and Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi finds that Arabic medical knowledge sits in a model's middle layers but often fails to reach its answer. Adapting only the lower layers beat adapting the whole network on medical multiple-choice questions.

Lateral - the other view

This is a preprint and has not been peer reviewed, but if it holds up, poor Arabic performance could be fixed cheaply without retraining a model from scratch.

Source: arXiv 2608.00207

Benchmark

MedAraBench tests models on 24,883 Arabic medical exam questions across 19 specialties

AP - what was published

Presented at ICLR 2026, built by digitising teaching material written by medical professionals in the region. Every model tested lost accuracy as questions demanded more clinical reasoning. The dataset and scoring scripts are public.

Lateral - the other view

Exam questions test recall and reasoning on paper. Passing them tells you little about how a model behaves with a real Arabic-speaking patient in front of it.

Sources: arXiv 2602.01714, ICLR 2026 listing

Money and deadlines

Deadline15 Nov

The Future Health Digital Innovation Challenge, co-developed with MBZUAI, Inception42 and Microsoft, closes. Open to clinicians and researchers worldwide. HealthTech Asia

Funding$2m

Arab Therapy (Jordan and Germany) raised it in August for its AI-supported mental health platform, led by Manara Ventures. ArabFounders

Funding$1.65m

HakeemDx raised it in May, led by Merak Capital, for bilingual Arabic and English clinical guidance inside hospital systems. Forbes Middle East

Tools doctors are using

Being listed here does not mean we recommend a tool, and no one pays to be listed. Before you put patient information into any of them, check where the data is stored and whether your hospital and regulator allow it.

Evidence search, worldwideOpenEvidence

Answers clinical questions from the medical literature and shows its citations.

CheckSign-up has been tied to US clinician verification and may not work from your country.

openevidence.com
AI scribe, worldwideHeidi

Listens to the consultation and drafts the note, letters and referrals for you to edit.

CheckIt records the consultation, so you need the patient's consent and your hospital's approval.

heidihealth.com
Evidence summaries, orthopaedicsOrthoEvidence

Short, appraised summaries of orthopaedic trials, each with a risk of bias rating.

CheckOrthopaedics only, and full access needs a subscription or a free trial.

myorthoevidence.com
Decision support, built in the regionHakeemDx

Clinical guidance in Arabic and English at the point of care, from Hakeem Health.

CheckIt is sold to hospitals, universities and payers, and an individual doctor may not be able to sign up.

Wamda report
Clinical assistant, UK and QatarRhazes AI

Transcribes consultations, drafts documents and suggests diagnoses. Piloted in a hospital in southern Lebanon.

CheckSuggested diagnoses are the part to test hardest against your own cases.

Tech.eu report
Arabic documentation, Saudi ArabiaNuxera AI

Turns Arabic clinical speech into notes and standard codes such as SNOMED and ICD-10.

CheckThe 70% cut in documentation time is the company's own figure.

Entrepreneur Middle East report

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