Airdoc’s Fei Chen: Artificial Intelligence Empowers Community Clinics
In China, community clinics and medical centers are the peripheral nerves of the medical system. This institution of general practitioners and family doctors are on the ground level of the social medical policy that guarantees full basic medical coverage.
Capital Medical University Professor Gu (顾湲) believes that developing this general medical service model comprised of village doctors, township doctors, city general practitioners and nurses, including countless community-level medical and health services as soon as possible is key to a healthy China.
Recently the national and local governments have been introducing new policies focusing more on the GP and family doctor service model. In 2014 Professor Gu, with the China Medical Tribune, organized the first China Family Doctors Development Forum to further promote this strategy.
At this year’s forum held in Chengdu in June, Artificial Intelligence (AI) entered the discussion for the first time.
Medical AI leader Airdoc product manager Fei Chen (陈飞) spoke at the conference on “artificial intelligence in community clinics”. Chen believes that with AI’s ability to quickly transfer knowledge and expertise from experienced doctors, mature artificial intelligence algorithms will become excellent assistants for community physicians, and greatly enhance the local clinics ability to provide better, more advanced medical care than ever before.
In recent years, artificial intelligence technology has burgeoned, successfully beating the best chess players in the world. Many experts in science and technology see artificial intelligence as the fourth industrial revolution. Medical care is where artificial intelligence is believed to be among the first areas to create tangible value.
Artificial intelligence in the medical field has a wide range of potential applications, such as: medical image recognition, biotechnology, auxiliary diagnosis, pharmaceutical drug development and nutrition, among others. Currently the most widely used and mature medical AI application is medical image recognition. There have been scores of medical artificial intelligence papers published. Stanford University published papers on applying artificial intelligence to identify skin cancer. Sun Yat-sen University-Affiliated Eye Hospital Professor Liu Yizhi confirmed, in his paper on congenital cataract AI diagnostic platform, the effectiveness of artificial intelligence in medical imaging recognition of the feasibility of clinical applications.
At the Chinese Medical Association National Dermatology Symposium, Beijing Hospital Dermatology Professor Wu Yiping spoke about a time he pitted Airdoc-Ac artificial intelligence algorithm against the hospital’s 11 professional dermatologists in a skin disease classification competition. Airdoc-Ac algorithm ranked first with an 85.5% accuracy rate, while the chief of dermatology yielded an accuracy of 83.3%.
Medical artificial intelligence has evolved beyond the laboratory. Airdoc collected a massive number of fundus photos from multiple hospitals around China and built an over-100 layer convolutional neural network, to train Airdoc diabetic retinopathy auxiliary analysis model. This model has since been used in practical clinical applications by many professional physicians.
In May 2017, Airdoc joined Shanghai Changzheng Hospital at the global Microsoft Build Conference to feature the Airdoc diabetic retinopathy AI technology, and its application in Shanghai Changzheng Hospital.
In the era of a planned economy in China, the achievements of distributed community level health care centers were obvious. With the development of the market economy, the allocation and utilization of medical resources have been shifting from the rural health care institutions to large, urban public hospitals. Medical and health institutions service capacity at the community level has become diminished, resulting in an “inverted pyramid” problem with regard to medical resource allocation.
August 2016, Chinese President Xi Jinping stressed at the recent National Health Conference that China must “accelerate the construction of healthy China, and strive to all-round, full-cycle protection of people’s health.”
With a national push to improve the efficiency of medical healthcare, Airdoc’s artificial intelligence products are on its way to doing its part by supporting a large number of community clinics as well as large hospitals. By continuing to learn from the experience of doctors, AI continually improves its ability to help doctors provide more efficient, accurate diagnoses to patients anywhere.
Community medical institutions will face huge pressures to meet the overwhelming medical treatment demands of this, the era of “big health”. Artificial intelligence seeks to aggregate and transfer the resources of large hospitals and expert doctors to the community clinics, allowing them to fulfill their original mandate, serving as the nation’s medical system’s “nerve endings” to advance disease prevention and overall quality of life.
