Italian AI tools advance research and surgery

Sapienza University of Rome and its spin‑off Babelscape have launched ChatMinerva, a multimodal artificial‑intelligence assistant that can process text, images, scanned pages and scientific documents, provide summaries, analyses and real‑time web information via DuckDuckGo. The system supports long contexts of up to 32,000 tokens and is being expanded with a 20‑billion‑parameter multilingual model trained on the Cineca supercomputer in Bologna.

In Ancona, surgeons at the University Hospital of the Marche region used an AI‑driven simultaneous‑translation system during an awake brain‑tumour operation on a 19‑year‑old South‑American patient. Developed by the University of Macerata’s computer‑science department, the tool translated the patient’s spoken Spanish into Italian in real time, allowing the surgical team to monitor cognitive and language functions throughout the procedure and reduce the risk of post‑operative deficits.