AsiaIndustrial NetNews: During the two sessions this year, artificial intelligence was written into the government work report for the first time, which attracted widespread attention from all parties. If the “MASTER” account at the beginning of this year swept the masters of China, Japan and South Korea on the Go battle platform, proving the huge potential of artificial intelligence technology, then in the future, in China, where the population is aging rapidly, medical health is expected to become a popular application field of artificial intelligence .
Artificial intelligence helps patients “have medicine to treat” as soon as possible
In the laboratory of a tertiary hospital, the patient’s tissue was removed from the operating room and waiting for the doctor to make a wax slice, and then put it under a microscope to observe whether there are tumor cells or what kind of tumor cells. This seemingly complicated work may be later Artificial Intelligence (AI) Alternative.
“AI will become an extension and assistant of doctors’ intelligence,” said Fu Gang, chairman of Baheal Pharmaceutical Group, which operates nearly 10,000 hospitals. On March 28, Baheal signed a strategic cooperation agreement with IBM Watson Health to obtain the distribution rights of the latter’s application-oriented product “Watson Oncology” in the Chinese market for three years, helping doctors to provide patients with more accurate and Personalized medical solutions.
It is understood that IBM Watson technology can read 12 languages and has a strong learning ability, and even passed the exam equivalent to the qualification evaluation standard of American licensed physicians. “Watson Oncology” has learned and stored a large number of tumor cases from dozens of medical institutions in the United States, covering lung cancer, breast cancer, rectal cancer, etc. It is expected to gradually expand to 8 to 12 tumor fields in 2017.
“The development trend of tumor diseases in China is not optimistic. After introducing Watson, it will help patients to formulate a treatment plan based on their own conditions, rather than the same routine treatment steps.” Fu Gang said, of course, personal privacy will be protected, and doctors will use it during the process. It is necessary to process patient information, such as data desensitization, to prevent identity leakage.
In fact, the use of artificial intelligence technology to identify and diagnose tumors has gradually become a reality: recently, scientists from Google tried to segment breast cancer slice images into small areas of hundreds of thousands of pixels. Subsequently, they provided many pathological sections of tumor tissue and normal tissue for the artificial intelligence to learn and master the pixel-level discrimination skills. In the end, scientists invited pathologists to compete with artificial intelligence in “reading pictures”, and the result was that the accuracy rate of artificial intelligence surpassed that of pathologists.
Beyond diagnostics, Brian, senior vice president of the American Association for Drug Research and Manufacturers, said: “Artificial intelligence is very useful in facilitating the discovery of new drugs, giving patients and hospitals a possibility to greatly improve the effectiveness of treatments, and the transition from treatment to cure. The industry is going through exciting changes.”
Zhou Hong, general manager of Shanghai Roche Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., told reporters that in the past two years, Roche has invested in a genetic testing company and cooperated with a data analysis company to make the direction of new drug development more clear through the huge amount of information.
Artificial intelligence keeps heating up
For Chinese enterprises and medical institutions, the development of medical artificial intelligence has very obvious advantages: the “Global Artificial Intelligence Development Report 2016” released in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province last year shows that the cumulative number of artificial intelligence patent applications in China has reached 15,745, ranking first in the world. 2. There are 146 investments in the field of artificial intelligence, ranking third in the world.
Of course, innovative companies with a keen sense of smell will not miss this opportunity. In October last year, Baidu Medical Brain was released in Beijing, becoming the latest achievement of Baidu’s artificial intelligence in the medical field. In March this year, Zhejiang University announced the establishment of the Ruiyi Artificial Intelligence Research Center, which was supported by a donation of RMB 100 million from the Internet medical platform WeDoctor Group.
China’s medical authorities have also noticed this trend. In February of this year, China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission issued four normative standards for the application of artificial intelligence in the medical field to support the development of artificial intelligence in the application fields of auxiliary diagnosis and treatment technology from the policy level.
Hao Deming, executive vice president of the China Association of Non-Public Medical Institutions, believes that this will provide policy support for the large-scale application of artificial intelligence in medical services. In addition, the introduction of artificial intelligence systems will greatly improve the level of doctors’ diagnosis and treatment and service efficiency. By cultivating a group of medical personnel who are good at using intelligent tools, the current shortage of medical and nursing talents in my country will be solved.
Compared with speech recognition applications, unmanned driving and other fields, the “big explosion” trend of artificial intelligence can be foreseen. The industry generally believes that artificial intelligence also has broad prospects in the field of health care.
Facing a huge talent gap
The current rapid development of artificial intelligence technology benefits from advances in three areas: powerful computing power, reasonable optimization algorithms and high-quality big data. To get a machine to think like a human, it has to be “fed” with big data, hoping it will find patterns in it. China’s huge population base and big data accumulated in genomics, imaging and clinical fields are one of the most reliable resources for the development of medical artificial intelligence.
“China can establish a national-level medical artificial intelligence engineering center, led by domestic comprehensive colleges and universities with first-class levels in medicine, pharmacy, and information technology, attracting big data application companies, artificial intelligence development companies, and pharmaceutical R&D companies to jointly develop Participate in and accelerate the development of the Chinese version of the ‘Watson’ system.” Guo Guangchang, chairman of Fosun Group, wrote in a proposal for the two sessions this year.
At the performance conference of Fosun Pharma on the 29th, artificial intelligence was mentioned again. Wu Yifang, President of Fosun Pharma, said that it will focus on the layout of cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence. Driven by human genome and artificial intelligence technology, the medical industry will undergo great changes, and innovation will likely bring 5 to 10 years of springboard development opportunities for China’s medical industry.
To do this, talent can be an obstacle. Statistics show that less than 25% of AI practitioners in China have more than 10 years of industry experience, compared with 50% in the United States.
In this regard, the McKinsey report pointed out that China faces a huge artificial intelligence talent gap. Governments need to invest heavily in AI-related education and research programs, while gathering top talent globally.
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