Tencent Miying announced its new AI medical image reading technology for screening glaucoma
On June 16th, Tencent Miying (腾讯觅影), the medical image reading platform of Tencent, and Wang Ningli (王宁利) research team from Tongren Hospital (同仁医院) debuted their latest technology in early-stage glaucoma screening on the 13th conference held by China Medical Doctor Association and eye doctor chapter in Zhengzhou.
Dr. Wang Ningli asserted that early-stage glaucoma screening is the best approach to prevent vision loss caused by glaucoma. The new technology employs AI tech to screen and detect early-stage glaucoma and the accuracy is claimed to exceed 95%.
Diagnosis glaucoma at an early stage can help doctors to intervene in the progress of vision loss. The AI screening technology could shed some lights to China’s eye disease diagnosis, prevention, and so the treatment. The tension caused by the shortage of China’s medical resources and unbalanced allocation can be soothed by the new AI medical image reading technology.
The top three vision loss reasons are cataracts, glaucoma, and macular degeneration. However, at the current stage, eye-disease-related AI medical image reading technology mainly focuses on diabetic retina exam and glaucoma screening. Compared with curable cataracts, which can be cured by cataract surgery, glaucoma-caused vision impairment is inevitable. Hence, early-stage diagnosis of glaucoma and prevention are critical for potential glaucoma patients.
Yet the glaucoma AI screening technology has not been widely applied, the diabetic retina exam has been installed in some clinics and hospitals for trials and assisting doctors in diagnosis. As the same as glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy impairs vision, which is also an inevitable process. Vision impairment caused by the two is a chronical process and it is often too late to be treated when patients discover that they have lost vision.
The AI medical image reading aims at the efficiency and accuracy of medical image reading, and ultimately improves the accessibility of healthcare services from region to region in China. For medical image reading AI companies, most matured image-reading technology at the stage is pulmonary diseases, then liver and eye diseases. 12Sigma, Infervision, Airdoc, Deepwise, etc. all have image reading solutions in above-mentioned fields.
Tencent Miying is a function of Tencent’s AI development department. Tencent is officially appointed as one of the National Open Innovation Platform for Next Generation Artificial Intelligence on computer vision for medical AI by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology. China has four more open innovation platforms designated for different fields: Baidu focused on autonomous driving; iFlyTek is assigned to voice intelligence field; Alibaba is tasked with “city brains”; SenseTime is the open innovation platform for computer vision