Staff working in the packaging workshop of CanSino Biologics' new crown vaccine phase III production base. (Profile photo)
When artificial intelligence meets health care, what kind of sparks will be created? A few days ago, at the 7th World Intelligence Conference held in Tianjin, reporters visited the scene and found that under the continuous empowerment of artificial intelligence, the potential of medicine and medical development is gradually being released. Not only the solution of incurable diseases has ushered in the dawn, but also freed more doctors from basic work, so as to focus more on solving medical problems. The prospect of smart medical care benefiting mankind is worth looking forward to, and the blue ocean of the digital health industry needs to be explored.
Smart healthcare makes dreams a reality
At the intelligent technology exhibition of the World Intelligence Conference, a small and exquisite "iFLYTEK intelligent hearing aid" shaped like a headset attracted a lot of attention at the scene.
Ren Xiaoyu, Marketing Manager of the Retail Department of iFLYTEK Co., Ltd., introduced that in order to effectively solve the social medical problem of "inaudible" hearing loss patients, iFLYTEK has developed intelligent hearing aid products to realize digital multi-channel, App self-fitting, adaptive scene recognition and other functions.
In recent years, with the innovative application of artificial intelligence, big data and other technologies in the medical field, smart medical care has improved people's healthy life quality and become a breakthrough in the transformation and upgrading of the medical industry.
Intelligent body temperature management is an important application of intelligent technology in the medical field. At this conference, Becton Medical Equipment (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. unveiled its latest target temperature management system products. Liu Chungang, sales manager of the company's northern region, said that in the past, patients had to be cooled by ice and alcohol, which was inefficient and uncontrollable. With the introduction of automatic monitoring, automatic feedback and hydrogel patented technology, today's medical temperature control blankets can achieve rapid cooling, smooth and long-lasting, greatly saving the labor and time costs of medical staff.
The "Medical Image Data Sharing Platform" launched by China Telecom is committed to promoting the integration and application of medical big data, promoting the sharing and mutual recognition of national inspection and inspection data, alleviating the problems of examination, inquiry and access that the people are concerned about, so as to realize the sharing of medical resources and save social resources.
On the "Tianjin Smart Health Cloud Image Benefiting Service Platform", there are all the statistical data that can be displayed to the outside world, such as the number of patient registrations, documents, and shared accesses. Wang Jiong, director of the Health Industry Center of the Government and Enterprise Customer Department of China Telecom Tianjin Branch, introduced that the platform uploads about 90% of the image data of medical institutions in real time, and can be shared across medical institutions through the examination data authorized by patients. Patients themselves can also access, share, and download their own examination data in real time, which helps eliminate medical data information silos and truly promote the digitalization and intelligent upgrading of the industry.
The accelerated integration of smart technology and the medical industry is continuing to empower people's lives. "For example, in the field of brain science research, the introduction of intelligent technology to assist in test judgment can more accurately carry out functional area division and pathological research." In the view of Ming Dong, vice president of Tianjin University, the wave of intelligence is bound to become a boost for scientific research and application in the field of medical technology in the future. A number of experts at the meeting said that smart medical care has broad prospects, which will continuously improve the efficiency of consultation, diagnostic accuracy and convenience of seeking medical treatment.
Smart pharmaceuticals are more scientific and environmentally friendly
Online registration, graded diagnosis and treatment, electronic medical records... Innovate and develop the big health industry by means of big data, build a smart medical system, and land in many places across the country. At the same time, artificial intelligence extends to the pharmaceutical field, and efficient and green pharmaceuticals become possible.
Traditional drug synthesis production usually adopts reactor batch production mode, which has problems such as large solvent usage and high energy consumption. The continuous reaction technology that conforms to the development trend of intelligence provides a new way to replace the batch reaction with a continuous flow chemical synthesis method, which has higher safety and less "three wastes" generation. Located in Tianjin Development Zone, Kaileying has applied this technology to pharmaceutical commercialization, realizing the industrial application of different process types such as continuous low-temperature lithiation, continuous catalytic hydrogenation, continuous photochemistry, continuous ozonation, etc., and its business covers many fine chemical fields such as pharmaceuticals, pesticides, coatings, advanced materials, and biosynthesis.
With the assistance of artificial intelligence, drug production is more accurate. Through the transformation from synthesis and manufacturing to continuous synthesis and continuous manufacturing, the pharmaceutical industry has taken into account production safety and green sustainability while improving drug consistency quality standards and protecting human health.
Relying on the established mRNA technology platform and the sequence optimization software independently designed and developed, CanSino Biologics, a vaccine manufacturer, can obtain key sites that affect stability and the optimal sequence that effectively increases antigen expression, thereby shortening product development time and quickly realizing the industrialization of scientific research results. The first phase of CanSino's mRNA vaccine production base has a design capacity of 100 million doses, which has entered the trial production stage.
As one of the five core technology platforms of CanSino Biologics, mRNA technology has a wide range of applications, in addition to the development of new crown vaccines, influenza vaccines, new crown and influenza combination vaccines, mRNA zoster vaccines and respiratory syncytial virus mRNA vaccines are all feasible research and development directions in the future. Smart technology empowers vaccine production and will bring good news to the prevention of more diseases.
Smart pharmaceuticals also help more people to take safe medicines and reassuring medicines. Qu Haibin, a professor at the School of Pharmacy of Zhejiang University, said that continuous pharmacy with process analysis systems as a means of production management ensures the consistency and reliability of the final product.
"We hope to provide a one-stop intelligent sharing platform for environmental protection and safety for the pharmaceutical and chemical industry." During the conference, Chen Junwei, deputy general manager of Zhejiang Changhai Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., said that with the development of flexible technology application platform, pharmaceutical safety cost reduction and efficiency improvement are no longer a dream.
There is a long way to go to popularize smart healthcare
While artificial intelligence brings new hope to more patients to cure, it also frees doctors from complicated affairs and focuses more on scientific research on the diagnosis and treatment of incurable diseases.
According to Liu Shiyuan, chairman of the China Medical Imaging AI Industry-University-Research Innovation Alliance, the results of a national medical imaging artificial intelligence survey show that the utilization rate of artificial intelligence in large hospitals has reached 73%. For example, in coronary imaging treatment, in the past, it often took about 30 minutes for a patient to go from scanning to image reconstruction to generating a report. Today, with the assistance of artificial intelligence, the reconstruction process is shortened to about 1 minute, which greatly improves the inspection efficiency. "Faster examinations mean that more coronary examinations can be done in hospitals in a single day, and patients benefit from it." Liu Shiyuan said.
In addition, artificial intelligence has a high detection rate in lung nodules, coronary CTA imaging, head and neck CTA artificial intelligence models, fracture models, perfusion and other detections. Especially in some parts that are easily occluded, the higher resolution of artificial intelligence can alert doctors to possible lesions.
During the epidemic, the Tianhe new-generation supercomputer located in Tianjin Binhai New Area continued to provide computing power support for the fight against the epidemic, and accelerated R&D and application in many fields such as drug screening, auxiliary diagnosis, and cloud collaborative diagnosis. Among them, relying on the "Tianhe Artificial Intelligence Innovation Integration Platform", the National Supercomputing Tianjin Center has built an artificial intelligence assistance system for comprehensive analysis of new coronary pneumonia CT images, which realizes the function of detecting the characteristics of new coronavirus pneumonia based on CT images, which can be used as a clinical auxiliary diagnosis method and effectively improve the screening ability of new coronary pneumonia.
In the daily management of hospitals, artificial intelligence also lives up to expectations. Jia Wang, vice president of Beijing Tiantan Hospital affiliated to Capital Medical University, said that relying on the highly intelligent intelligent management center of "Tiantan Brain", you can see the operation status of every part of the hospital, and scroll every 15 seconds to display the real-time status on the large screen, so that the hospital can improve the operational efficiency of the hospital and achieve high-quality development through intelligent and refined management.
The prospects of the digital health industry are promising, but the deep integration of artificial intelligence and medical health is not achieved overnight, and technological progress and medical demand drive go hand in hand. Moreover, there is a shortage of technical talents who are good at artificial intelligence and familiar with the medical industry. Although many smart medical applications have appeared in China, the existing number of applications is still insufficient to drive the rapid development of the industry. At the same time, there are data security risks in the healthcare industry. How to balance convenience and safety will be an eternal issue with the development of smart healthcare.
Liu Fei, president of 360 Group Tianjin Company, believes that as an important public service organization, the network security of medical institutions is not only related to the safe operation of medical institutions themselves, but also directly related to social harmony and stability. He suggested that by building a public service platform for the medical and health industry, security assurance capabilities can be improved and business processes such as supervision and operation can be connected.
Smart healthcare has a long way to go to benefit more people. Wang Jianguo, Secretary of the Party Committee of the Tianjin Municipal Health Commission, said that continuing to promote the innovation of "Internet + medical health" and accelerating the in-depth development of national health informatization not only deeply empowers the health industry, but also relates to improving patients' medical experience and the people's sense of gain, happiness and security. (Reporter: Mao Zhenhua, Liang Sister, Wang Ning)
Source: Economic Information Daily