820,000 people. That is the number of patients that the Department of Cardiology of the Zhongshan hospital attended in 2024. A very high figure for a country in which doctors are missing and that sees that, every so often, every so often, His hospitals overflow. Increased higher health coverage, especially for an increasingly aging populationand the answer has been found in artificial intelligence.
In a cardiologist, specifically, which has trained with a base of hundreds of thousands of people and has all the support of the government.
Cardiomind. That is the name of artificial intelligence that has been developed by the Zhongshan hospital, the University of Fudan and the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Academy for Science. It is a joint effort to create an AI that, according to them, is able to reason as their best cardiologists.
GE Junbo is one of those outstanding cardiologists of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Comment They are feeding the system with data, but they also teach him “to think as an expert first level cardiologist.”
Co-pilot. In this way, Cardiomind compares patient history and the results of tests based on global research to generate diagnostic suggestions. And if you were raising one, leaving the possibility of leaving your heart’s health on the awareness of a machine, in the word “suggestion” is the key.
According to its creators, the idea is not that doctors are replaced, but that it helps those members of a congested system to work faster and more accurately. “With their help, our doctors can attend more patients, reduce the workload and improve both the quality of the diagnosis and the treatment,” commented The doctor.
Pillars. The secret of the pizza is in the dough, in the case of AI, that special sauce is the training. Cardiomind is a multimodal system that can analyze and process data from various sources (electrocardiograms, ultrasound and laboratory results, for example) to provide its diagnosis, and it is what has been trained.
The source has been hundreds of thousands of medical records that the Hospital Cardiology Department had stored for decades, learning in the process how doctors think both in the diagnosis and during treatment. In addition to multimodal and very trained, it specializes in one thing: cardiovascular diseases.
Total government support. And all this comes from the hand of itself. China is investing strong in development of artificial intelligences and, although in the West only a few as Deepseek They are the ones that attract attention, the country has been betting for the development of these systems to decongest several organisms.
And that of medicine is fundamental. In January of this year, and apart from Cardiomind, established In Shanghai the first test and verification center of large models of AI in the field of medicine. Their fields will be assistance, disease prediction, personalized treatment according to the history of each patient and support to develop drugs.
Necessary. Such is that impulse that several hospitals already have their own AI platforms, even some that They combine Contemporary and traditional medicine. And the reason why this technological development is being promoted is the one mentioned above. The population is getting older and doctors are missing.
It is estimated that the country has 1.9 doctors per 1,000 inhabitants and They want have 5.5 nurses per 1,000 people for this year. In other countries, the average is devastating. In Spain, for example, there is 6.21 doctors per 1,000 inhabitants. In the case of nurses, the figure is 7.12.
Challenges. Now, despite that government impulse, there are three elements to take into account. One is that of the data security to guarantee privacy. In the case of Cardiomind, those responsible developed a firewall with encrypted data. Other countries are studying How to apply AI in cardiology and, precisely, data leakage and ethics is a point that is usually present Among the concerns.
Ethics also plays a role, since if it goes from suggesting to a more important role, it would be necessary to legally regulate it. At the moment, or they are in charge “only” of paperwork and records or, if they attend decision making, the last word has a human.
In addition, there is the technological issue itself. The development of these artificial intelligences needs servers and calculation power. It is something that China is solving more or less controversial forms buying items that They should not be able to buy due to the commercial war with the West, but also using solutions developed at home, such as the chips of a huawei that is the spearhead in development of hardware for AI in the Asian giant.
Images | Huawei,
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