December 6, 2018 — Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) healthcare company YITU healthcare released two brand-new products, Intelligent Diagnostic and Treatment Platform for CancerScreening and Care.AI Intelligent 4D Imaging System for Chest CT, at the annual meeting of Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), Nov. 25-30 in Chicago.
In particular, Care.AI Intelligent 4D Imaging System for Chest CT is the first AI system, according to YITU, to break through detection of pulmonary nodules and realize the real-time imaging of a wide variety of other lesions. Together with other cancer screening solutions, it will greatly reduce the workload of radiologists, become a clinical assistant to radiologists, and provide the possibility for large-scale early cancer screening worldwide, according to the company.
This comes amidst a backdrop of the latest Annual World Cancer Report, released by the World Health Organization (WHO) on Nov. 3, 2018. This year alone, it is expected that there will be 18.1 million new cancer cases and 9.6 million cancer deaths worldwide. The incidence of lung cancer, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, prostate cancer, gastric cancer, and other cancers is still growing rapidly and show no sign of slowing down.
China's medical AI has developed rapidly over a short period of time, but most companies focus on detection of pulmonary nodules, which only account for about 50 percent of lung lesions in a chest computed tomography (CT) scan. Prof. Zhengyu Jin, chairman of the Chinese Society of Radiology, said that products that can only detect lung nodules are not assistants to radiologists, as the complete clinical diagnosis process for chest CT imaging has to include other types of lesions such as patchy shadow, stripe shadow and cystic shadow.
Care.AI Intelligent 4D Imaging System for Chest CT is a centralized display of the scientific research achievements made by YITU Healthcare in recent years, and can provide information sign analysis and diagnosis to achieve efficacy prediction and evaluation. Jin said this system basically realizes the full-dimensional detection of lesions for chest CT imaging, improves the functions of medical AI and promotes its application in clinical practice.
In addition to this product, Intelligent Diagnostic and Treatment Platform for Cancer Screening was also released at the same time, covering multiple cancers. This platform relies on YITU Healthcare's disease-centered massive multimodal medical data to provide doctors with imaging detection, lesion analysis, clinical decision-making assistance, patient management and other services.
For a long time, it has been difficult to widely promote large-scale early screening of diseases, especially cancer screening, restricted by the availability of limited high-quality medical resources, according to YITU. The emergence of high-level medical AI makes it possible for AI systems to assist doctors becoming providers of medical services to a certain extent and provides the possibility for large-scale early screening of tumors.
The YITU technology is being used in a large-scale cancer screening program called “AI Map for Cancer Screening” that recently launched in China, according to Cathy Fang, M.D., vice president of YITU Healthcare. At present, the program covers 19 provinces and autonomous regions in China, and coverage is still increasing. The preliminary screening results from a collaboration project between YITU Healthcare and the 2nd Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University identified 10 cases of lung cancers out of over 1,300 high-risk people, including 9 early cancer patients, all of whom have been verified by pathological testing and are in a state of recovery after prompt treatment. This is the world's first time to use AI solutions on cancer screening on a large population, according to the company.
For more information: www.yitutech.com/en