City awaits Covid-19 scan analyzers
BAGUIO City Mayor Benjie Magalong announced the arrival of technology for faster diagnosis of the Covid-19 with the help of international partners.
Magalong said tech giant Huawei has reached out to the city and will send the latest technology for medical frontliners to help the city.
“For the past two days, our city through our Management Information and Technical Division (MITD) has been working together with the technical team of Huawei and Baguio doctors to set up the system in BGH. It will be the first of its kind in the country,” the mayor said.
The mayor said the artificial intelligence (AI) analyzer is a diagnostic system that would help doctors identify highly suspicious Covid-19 cases.
“Unlike the current screening test kits which would take 4-5 days, the AI system only takes 2 minutes. Hopefully, it will be up and running by Tuesday,” Magalong said.
The company, in a statement, said the release of the Huawei Cloud AI-Assisted Diagnosis for Covid-19 has been rolled out.
Huawei Cloud worked with the Huazhong University of Science & Technology and Lanwon Technology to develop and launch an AI-assisted quantitative medical image analysis service for Covid-19.
With Huawei Cloud’s leading AI technologies such as computer vision and medical image analysis, the service can automatically, quickly, and correctly output CT quantification results to imaging and clinical doctors, alleviating the shortage of imaging doctors who can accurately diagnose Covid-19, relieving the pressures of quarantines and reducing the heavy workloads of doctors.
The service also utilizes the powerful computing capability of Huawei Ascend series AI chips to output the quantization result of a single case in seconds.
“AI + doctor review” is dozens of times faster than manual quantitative image evaluation, which greatly improves the diagnosis efficiency.
Huawei Cloud leverages the computer vision and medical image analysis technologies to segment the multiple pulmonary ground-glass opacities (CGOs) and lung consolidation and make quantitative evaluations through CTs of patients’ lungs. It combines clinical information and laboratory results to help doctors more accurately distinguish between early, advanced, and severe stages of Covid-19, facilitating the early screening and prevention/control. For confirmed cases in hospitals, this AI-assist service can perform registration and quantitative analysis on the 4D dynamic data of multiple rechecks within a short period of time, helping doctors effectively evaluate patients’ conditions and drug use effects.
According to the analysis of hundreds of Covid-19 cases and non-infected cases, Huawei Cloud AI-assisted quantitative diagnosis service has implemented industry-leading Dice Similarity Coefficient (DICE: overlaps between the predicted lesions and the actual lesions) and Absolute Volume Difference (AVD: volume differences between the predicted lesions and the actual lesions) of lesion area segmentation. The results are highly consistent with the precise manual sketching by doctors. In addition, with Huawei’s Ascend AI-series chips, the service can output CT quantization results in seconds. Compared with the traditional methods that doctors use to manually draw ROIs for quantitative evaluation, this service significantly improves diagnosis efficiency.
The “AI + CT” medical image analysis service for Covid-19 is developed and constructed based on the Huawei Cloud AI Health-medical image analysis platform. The platform uses the Huawei Cloud AI Ascend cluster service and the ModelArts one-stop AI development and management platform to implement one-stop medical image data governance and labeling, model training, and evaluation, and visualized rendering, providing powerful support for universities and hospitals with massive AI computing, the platform, and algorithm power.
Huawei Cloud has also been working with various industries to carry out multiple AI-based scientific research projects on Covid-19. Results of ultra-large-scale computer-assisted drug screening together is done by Huawei Cloud and many other scientific research institutions. And to cap it off, Huawei Cloud also worked with Yiwise to provide an intelligent, voice-based epidemic follow-up system for various organizations and institutions for free.
Huawei Cloud is open to provide this AI-assisted medical image analysis service for designated hospitals for free. In the future, Huawei Cloud will continue to upgrade the diagnosis assistant system for all lung diseases (including pneumonia, lung nodules, and lung cancer) to implement early screening and treatment. (With reports from PR and Ron Oriel Darunday Villagonzalo)