Beijing Tianming Innovation Data Technology Co., Ltd. was invited to attend the 2019 Huawei Full Connect Conference. Tianming Innovation CEO Mr. Xu Ming delivered a speech on the theme of " Reshaping the Occupational Health Ecosystem-Huawei Cloud Helps Tianming Innovation ", explaining Tianming Technology With AI technology, a breakthrough innovation in the field of preventive diagnosis of pneumoconiosis.
Pneumoconiosis is a "cancer" associated with economic development. Not only my country, but also developed countries in the United Kingdom and the United States have not been spared. However, in the past ten years, the number of new cases of pneumoconiosis in my country has not only remained high, but also has been increasing. The incidence of patients has spread across all regions and industries across the country, causing great pain and loss to the country, society and patients' families.
Tianming Innovation CEO Mr. Xu Ming pointed out that there are two reasons why the pneumoconiosis problem continues to this day. First, the affected groups are mainly poor migrant workers in remote areas. They sacrifice their personal health and even their lives in an unqualified working environment in exchange for economic sources of survival. Second, my country's pneumoconiosis prevention and control system is inadequate. There are big problems in the control of the production environment by enterprises, and the coverage and effectiveness of the entire occupational health examination. Therefore, Tianming Innovation has put forward its own ideas-starting from prevention through AI, gradually solving some bottlenecks in the system, and finally solving a large number of new problems of pneumoconiosis by improving the occupational health system.
This involves three aspects: national policy, technological realization and business model.
National policy attention. In recent years, the country has formulated many related policies in order to continuously reduce or even eliminate the new incidence of pneumoconiosis. In July this year, in order to strengthen the prevention and control of pneumoconiosis and the rescue and rescue of pneumoconiosis patients, and to effectively protect the occupational health rights of workers, 10 departments including the National Health Commission jointly formulated the "Pneumoconiosis Prevention Action Plan" under the organization of the State Council.
However, due to the extremely limited medical resources related to occupational diseases and the severe shortage of experienced occupational disease physicians, and most of them are distributed in first- and second-tier cities, this has led to the failure of early screening at the grassroots level, which should be the most important role in the prevention and control of occupational diseases. National policies are difficult to effectively implement the most important early prevention and detection of pneumoconiosis.
In terms of technical realization, with the breakthrough of the new generation of AI technology, computers have made breakthroughs in certain tasks that had to be done by doctors, especially in the area of pneumoconiosis screening. After 3 years of research and development, Tianming Innovation has made a major breakthrough in the AI recognition algorithm of digital X-ray chest radiographs that are diagnostic standards for pneumoconiosis. After public appraisal by authoritative experts in the industry, the accuracy of its "picture reading" exceeds 90%, and the sensitivity index reaches 99%, even exceeding the reading level of professional doctors with more than 10 years of experience. Experts believe that it can be used in the field of pneumoconiosis screening . This will help solve the biggest bottleneck faced by pneumoconiosis prevention and screening-the shortage of experienced occupational disease doctors in primary occupational disease medical institutions, and the quality and speed of screening cannot be guaranteed.
At the meeting, Mr. Xu Ming especially introduced the latest development and ideas of Tianming Innovation in AI+ Healthcare. "The problems that AI needs to solve are systemic, so it must be solved with a systematic approach, not a single point of algorithm experiment." He especially emphasized that Tianming innovation in the research and development of pneumoconiosis is that medicine is first and problem-driven. , Industry-oriented, standard guarantee. Tianming Innovation not only regards the diagnosis of pneumoconiosis as a simple image reading and AI image analysis, but also breaks it down into four parts. First, starting from the original respiratory medicine and chest imaging in the hospital, the most basic pneumoconiosis problem is defined through medicine. Second, analyze the real bottleneck of pneumoconiosis in the clinical and physical examination, and then find the focus of the problem. Third, the classification of pneumoconiosis is an "occupational disease" rather than simply a natural "disease", which has very deep industry attributes. Therefore, to talk about occupational diseases or engage in such research and development without the background of the industry and the situation of the enterprise is a source of water, and it is difficult to guarantee reliability. Fourth, setting standards is also the biggest problem in the current AI+ field. On the one hand, the AI algorithm represented by deep learning lacks interpretability; on the other hand, as a new thing, the application of the algorithm lacks accumulation. Medically emphasizes high-quality, systematic (multi-dimensional), standardized, and large-sample data. However, domestic AI medical companies, regardless of their size and scale, have generally only been established for 2-4 years, which is extremely large in this limited time. Most of the time and energy are also arduously acquiring data and "exercise (experiment)" algorithms. But without standards, the accuracy, various indicators, and reliability of the AI-assisted diagnosis/screening system cannot be discussed. Practitioners do not know what accuracy is and how to grasp the gold standard from the root, and there is no way to talk about clinical application.
Tianming Innovation has made a breakthrough here. When it began to engage in intelligent screening for pneumoconiosis, it began to prepare to solve the standard problem. The data hasn't changed, the standard first. Through repeated discussions and repeated deliberation with clinical experts in the industry, occupational disease experts, and radiology experts, constantly verifying hypotheses, constantly overturning conclusions, constantly updating requirements, constantly testing algorithms, and constantly iterating annotations... Especially the annotations are only a large number of data sets. Second, certain types and dimensions of data input and output. In some cases, the data of the same case is marked successively or even more than 10 times.
Based on the country’s original diagnostic standards and expert consensus, dozens of hospitals’ continuous iterative data, continuous improvement of labeling rules based on expert advice, and long-term algorithm practice of self and external cooperation, Tianming Innovation has accumulated pneumoconiosis that only oneself can truly understand AI application norms in the field of disease may be the basis and practice of future AI + pneumoconiosis screening standards.
We believe that the complete elimination of pneumoconiosis requires not only AI technology, but also a support model for long-term support. The root cause of the pneumoconiosis problem is that my country's original public health-based prevention and treatment system gradually collapsed after the 1990s, which caused workers to lose their protective barriers. Therefore, it is very necessary to establish an ecosystem that can operate for a long time and is beneficial to the country, enterprises, medical institutions, patients, dust collectors, and insurance institutions.
In terms of business model, Tianming Innovation is an intelligent technology company in occupational health management and occupational disease prevention. After more than 3 years of continuous contact, visits, communication and cooperation, it has united hundreds of occupational disease medical institutions and occupational health examination institutions. , Dust-exposed enterprises, deploy their own systems in front-line occupational disease prevention and control institutions to test, trial and even apply in actual physical examination environments. It is not only conducting technical verification, but also verifying the business support model for long-term sustainable service provision.
"Tianming Innovation has a strong technical background. We not only rely on the strength of Tsinghua University, but also maintain cooperative relations with many top research universities and research institutions in the United States. We not only have in-depth theoretical understanding of computer algorithms, but also have rich research experience and medical engineering. Practice. At the same time, the technical team led by Academician Zhang Bo of the Tsinghua Artificial Intelligence Research Institute as the chief scientist and the medical team led by the chief expert of occupational diseases of the National Health Commission, Li Dehong, come from two aspects: computer technology and medicine. Accurate analysis and definition of problems, coupled with the founding team’s own rich engineering, product and market background, has created a “tackling” team focused on solving problems. This is the key to solving the problem and guarantees the national pneumoconiosis attack plan The strong support is also an "atypical" advantage that other teams and companies in the industry do not have.
Mr. Xu Ming concluded: Occupational diseases continue to occur in China today, the pressure on prevention and control is still great, and the bottleneck of the occupational health service chain is prominent. Almost one in every three of the nearly 300 million migrant workers is a dust collector.
Therefore, the goal of Tianming Innovation is to do its best to solve the pneumoconiosis problem as soon as possible, serve the society, and achieve breakthroughs in medical technology. By cooperating with occupational disease medical institutions, occupational health examination institutions, enterprises, and insurance companies that are in the same dire straits, it serves those disadvantaged groups who have no choice, so that artificial intelligence is no longer cold, and "warm technology" helps to contribute silently to the society. The builders have a healthy life.