Here at Newsflash Online, we have been pleased to see the use of artificial intelligence (AI) expand into the medical field. The London-based medical company Medopad and the huge Chinese tech firm and games publisher Tencent are collaborating to use AI and smartphone technology to develop a system that speeds up the diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease.
The research team used videos of patients who had been previously diagnosed with Parkinson’s by doctors at King's College Hospital in London to train the system to recognise the symptoms.
In an interview with the BBC, Dr Wei Fan, head of the Tencent Medical AI lab, said: ‘We use the AI to measure the deterioration of Parkinson's disease patients without the patient wearing any sensors or devices.’
The purpose of the system is to decrease the time it takes to conduct a motor function assessment. Currently, the assessment normally takes more than 30 minutes.
By using Tencent’s AI technology in conjunction with Medopad’s smartphone technology, the team hopes to complete the assessment in less than three minutes, with the possibility that the patient would not need to visit a hospital to undergo the assessment.
Medopad manufactures wearable devices and apps that observe and check the progress of patients suffering from various medical conditions.
Medopad’s CEO Dan Vahdat said that his firm chose to partner with Tencent because no other company had the extent of the resources that Tencent has.
‘Our ambition is to impact a billion patients around the world – and to be able to get to that kind of scale we need to work with partners that have international reach,’ he told the BBC.
In his interview with the BBC, Wei Fan also highlighted the extent of his company’s ambition to be the leader in health AI and that it wants to help overcome diseases that impact a vast number of people.
Given that China and the US are competing against each other to be the leader in AI development, there is some debate as to whether the company can follow through on its plans to conduct extensive testing of the system in the US.
Wei Fan dismissed those concerns and insisted that the work on the joint project with Medopad will be transparent and open and will benefit everyone.
‘We are looking forward to clinical trials in both China and US and other countries. We will strictly follow local regulations and when we have the results they will benefit not just one country but globally,’ he told the BBC.
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