Medical experts from China, the United States, Japan and Italy shared COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment experience via video conference on April 15. [Photo/ahwang.cn]

Medical experts on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, the United States, Japan and Italy extolled the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in epidemic diagnosis and treatment during a video conference on April 15.

The experts shared their experiences and research results on differential diagnosis, clinical treatment and imaging tests, looking to join forces to win the global struggle against the epidemic.

Anhui Infervision, an AI company focusing on the medical field, and China Speech Valley, a national AI industrial park where the company is located, organized the conference together.

According to Anhui Infervision, nearly one third of the 340 hospitals around the world it cooperated with used its AI-assisted COVID-19 diagnostic system – InferRead CT Pneumonia – to help doctors with pneumonia screening and epidemic monitoring.

CT imaging is widely recognized as an effective way to identify COVID-19 patients. Through CT images, doctors can intuitively find changes in a patient's lungs and make a judgment on the patient's infection status and the severity of the disease.

Professor Xu Haibo, director of the imaging department at Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, said that the system helped reduce the amount of work required to analyze CT images, as the hospital was experiencing an unprecedented shortage of medical resources when the epidemic broke out in Wuhan.

"The system can carry out effective and accurate triage, perform quantitative lesion assessments, and follow up on patients to assess their disease progression," said Xu.

The system had been promoted to 33 provincial administrative regions in China by early April, after being shown to be effective in Wuhan.

Paras Lakhani from the imaging information department at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in the United States, said the hospital introduced the system at the end of March, which helped to reduce the burden on doctors, provide quick triage support and treat cases through quantitative analysis of symptoms.

Carlo Cosimo Quattrocchi, clinical director of the diagnostic imaging department at UCBM Hospital in Italy, said that the system gave COVID-19 patients higher risk scores than cancer patients with overlapping CT features of COVID-19, which provided an important basis for accurate differential diagnosis.

CEO of CVIC Medical Group in Japan, surnamed Kosawa, said that the system puts patients with suspicious pneumonia at the top of the patient list, which is convenient for quickly and easily selecting patients who need priority treatment.

Through long-term cooperation with many medical institutions, Infervision collected a large number of clinical data and developed data processing models. It built its economic headquarters in the Yangtze River Delta region in 2019, in the China Speech Valley in the Hefei National High-tech Industry Development Zone.

Qi Dongfeng, president of the operating unit of China Speech Valley, said the conference is part of efforts to boost the development of the smart healthcare industry. He said the industrial park is striving to promote the innovative application of AI into medical fields and encouraged the company to make the most of the relevant favorable policies.