The "Smart Medical Heart" Team from Northwestern Polytechnical University, headquartered in Xi’an, Shaanxi province, in Northwest China, won first prize in the China Innovation Competition, after four months of competition alongside the 1,400 students that made up the 467 competing teams, stemming from 130 universities nationwide.  

The winning team members (from left to right) Fan Ruilong, Liu Yuan, and Su Meng at the award ceremony. 

The winning team is composed of graduate students Fan Ruilong, Liu Yuan, and Su Meng from the School of Software at Northwestern Polytechnical University. The award-winning work "A Multimodal Interactive Depression Preliminary Screening Diagnosis System Based on Ascend CANN" combines a large language model to intelligently analyze multimodal data of EEG, eye movement, speech, and micro-expressions to evaluate the degree of depression in participants. By using AI virtual image technology to simulate real doctor-patient communication scenarios, the psychological defense line of patients can be lowered, in order to efficiently evaluate their psychological status.

When talking about the original intention of developing this system, team member Fan Ruilong said that currently, there are many depression patients worldwide who face problems such as an uneven distribution of medical resources, shortage of professional medical personnel, shame and social prejudice, all of which may lead to patients not receiving timely and effective treatment.

“We hope to develop such a system for the initial diagnosis of depression, reduce the threshold for patients to seek help, and alleviate the burden on traditional medical systems,” Fan said.

Another team member, Liu Yuan, said that the achievement could not have been made without the careful guidance of Associate Professor Xu Tao, the director of the Intelligent Perception Interaction Laboratory, who inspired the team to adhere to a problem oriented and demand oriented approach, starting from real life needs, and analyzing the pain points and bottlenecks currently existing in the industry.

The winning team at the competition. 

In recent years, the School of Software at Northwestern Polytechnical University has attached great importance to the innovative and practical abilities of students, focusing on the concept of "promoting learning and teaching through competitions", actively promoting students to participate in high-level competitions, and enhancing their systematic and scientific research abilities.

In 2023, students of the School of Software made outstanding achievements in the China Robot and Artificial Intelligence Competition, the China "Internet plus" Undergraduate Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition, the China University Computer Competition, the Undergraduate Mathematical Modeling Competition, the National Robot Championship and other competitions, and won 198 provincial and ministerial level awards.

This China Innovation Competition is guided by the National Higher Education Computer Education Research Association and has been successfully held for seven consecutive sessions since 2015, with a continuous increase in coverage and influence.

The competition is a prestigious and influential university technology competition, and also a key project of the Global Skills Academy of UNESCO.