Retina, the VoxelCloud’s product for medical image assisted diagnosis for ophthalmic diseases, got 499 points in the Chinese Medical Innovation & Artificial Intelligence Competition.
Presentation of Retina. Credit to Xinhua Net.
On April 27, VoxelCloud (体素科技) won the first prize in the Chinese Medical Innovation & Artificial Intelligence Competition, which was hold in Boao Forum for Asia International Convention Center. Retina, the VoxelCloud’s product for medical image assisted diagnosis for ophthalmic diseases, got 499 points in the competition. According to VoxelCloud, Retina has been used in more than 100 hospitals’ ophthalmology departments and endocrine departments.
Through online public voting and two-round experts assessment, 12 high-class products got the qualification to participate this competition. Besides, it is also a communication platform for medical institutions, enterprises and investment agencies, which focus on the new medical products with AI ability.
Retina is a software to assist doctors to diagnose all kinds of ophthalmic diseases, including diabetic retinopathy, diabetic macular edema, glaucoma, cataract, aged macular degeneration and so on. Its basic technology is image recognition. Trained by lots of fundus images with different kinds of diseases, Retina’s AI algorithm can not only make diagnosis for diseases with high accuracy, but also issue warnings for the risk patients. Besides, Retina can combine the results of image recognition with other patients’ information, which can raise the diagnostic accuracy and avoid missing some exceptional cases.
Retina's operation page. Photo: Credit to VoxelCloud.
Apart from Retina, VoxelCloud has another two products. One assists to make diagnosis on lung cancer, another one assists for coronary artery heart disease. VoxelCloud has advanced technology in deep learning and computer vision, whose funding team consists of top universities and laboratories, such as UCLA, CMU, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Mayo clinic, and so on. Their products has been used in hundreds of hospitals, including some top Chinses hospitals like PLAGH (北京301医院), Renji Hospital (仁济医院), Peking Union Medical College Hospital (北京协和医院), Zhongshan Hospital (中山医院), and so on.
The judge group of this competition consists of several top experts in policy-making and AI tech, including YOU Mao (游茂), the researcher from National Health Commission of the PRC, and XU Yi (徐毅), the vice president of AI and Digital Healthcare laboratory in Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. They think that the most important point for AI is risk assessment, which means all the developers of AI products should create a function block for risk management. Besides, security of patients data is another big problem that urges government to make law.
CHEN Xiaoping (陈小平), professor of University of Science and Technology of China, said that developed and practical AI products will not merely come from research materials, but come from the analysis of user requirements, which is typical in healthcare industry especially.
XIAO Mingchao, the vice president of the First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, said that AI can promote hospital management, medical innovation and efficiency partly, but it can do better. The AI medical products should be adapted to the doctors’ workflow and habits. In this point, Retina can raise the clinical work efficiency indeed.