China counts on AI to find a cure for its ailing health care system
The world’s most populous country is embracing AI to fill resource gaps in its health system, as private firms team up with hospitals on experimental diagnosis services
With more than 2,000 different skin diseases, it is impossible for non-specialists to know about all of them. That was the problem facing Shi Jiang, who for two decades has worked as a general practitioner in a community health clinic in Shanghai, where most his patients are elderly.
“Sometimes they would show me their ageing spots or moles, worried if they were abnormal. But it has been a long time since my dermatology studies at college,” the 45-year-old Shi said.
When he heard last month about Quality Skin, an experimental app for AI-powered dermatology diagnosis, Shi jumped at the chance to be among the first group of doctors to try it.
In China, health care has become one of the latest applications for AI, along with security and new retail, where technologies like natural language processing and computer vision are being applied to greatly improve efficiency in a country with an acute shortage of qualified doctors and nurses. Chinese companies from start-ups to tech giants are seizing the opportunity to apply AI solutions to everything from machine reading of CAT scans to processing and analysing medical queries.
Dermatology will be among the first disciplines to embrace AI, according to Cui Yong, research chief at China-Japan Friendship Hospital, which was hand-picked by authorities to experiment with internet-based medical consultations and came up with the Quality Skin app that can produce probability-weighted results within a minute of receiving high-resolution images of the skin condition.