When Attention Learns to Breathe: Sparse Transformers for Sustainable Medical AI
Opening — Why this matters now Healthcare AI has quietly run into a contradiction. We want models that are richer—multi-modal, context-aware, clinically nuanced—yet we increasingly deploy them in environments that are poorer: fewer samples, missing modalities, limited compute, and growing scrutiny over energy use. Transformers, the industry’s favorite hammer, are powerful but notoriously wasteful. In medicine, that waste is no longer academic; it is operational. ...