Recently, the popularity of ChatGPT and GPT-4 has aroused strong attention inside and outside the industry, and the core technology behind it - artificial intelligence, has become a "hot high-frequency word" in this period.
With the advent of the era of big data, cloud computing, and 5G, AI technology is developing rapidly. While subverting people's inherent impressions, it also shows more possibilities for artificial intelligence to help the development of various industries.
It is undeniable that artificial intelligence has gradually penetrated into everyone's work and life, and medical care, as an industry closely related to public health, is expected to achieve a new era of industrial development with the help of AI technology. According to statistics, in the past five years, nearly 100 billion funds have been injected into the artificial intelligence + medical track. Medical imaging AI, AI pharmaceuticals, medical AI robots and other subdivisions are making rapid breakthroughs and making great strides. AI medical care is gradually Become one of the focuses of the biomedical track.
With the continuous deepening of the integration of AI technology and the medical and health field, artificial intelligence technology represented by computer vision, natural language processing, machine learning, etc., has penetrated into various scenarios of the medical industry more and more widely, and has become an important tool to improve the level of medical services. important driving force.
It is foreseeable that, under the dual impetus of policy support and technological innovation, AI medical care is entering the fast lane, the market is gaining momentum, and people's healthy lives will be changed by the addition of AI.
Positive policy guidance, AI helps optimize the allocation of medical resources
In the past ten years, the aging process of China's population has been accelerating. Coupled with the huge population base, uneven distribution of medical resources, and lack of doctor resources, many major diseases and chronic diseases have no obvious symptoms in the early stage and the detection process is complicated. be found.
Artificial intelligence can effectively solve the problem of shortage of doctors and misallocation of medical resources. Industry opinion generally believes that the popularization and application of artificial intelligence can optimize the allocation of medical resources, promote the modernization of medical and health capabilities, promote hierarchical diagnosis and treatment, and promote systematic integration.
The three-year epidemic has made people pay more attention to medical health and further increased people's demand for medical care. Scientific and technological innovation in the medical and health field has become more important and urgent. The application of artificial intelligence in the medical field has also become one of the important strategic directions of the country. .
In recent years, the State Council, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Food and Drug Administration and other ministries and commissions have successively issued a series of policy documents to actively promote the innovative development of the medical AI industry. For example, promote the research and development of smart medical equipment such as AI imaging, AI diagnosis and treatment, and surgical robots; encourage the widespread application of AI in public epidemics, tumors and other diseases; take the lead in establishing an artificial intelligence standard system in medical and other fields in 2023, etc.
Judging from recent specific policies, the "Opinions on Further Improving the Medical and Health Service System" issued by the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council proposed to develop "Internet + Medical Health", build an industrial Internet platform for the medical field, and accelerate The application of the Internet, blockchain, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, big data, etc. in the medical and health field will strengthen the construction of a health and medical big data sharing, exchange and guarantee system.
The "Opinions on Further Deepening Reform and Promoting the Healthy Development of the Rural Medical and Health System" issued by the two offices not long ago also mentioned, "Build a rural telemedicine service system, promote remote consultation, appointment referral, Internet follow-up consultation, and remote inspection, and accelerate the promotion of manual medical services. Configuration and application of intelligent auxiliary diagnosis in rural medical and health institutions."
In fact, as early as last year, the policy released a signal to encourage artificial intelligence systems to penetrate into the grassroots level. On April 20, the National Health Commission's Medical Administration and Medical Administration released the "National Restricted Technology Catalog and Clinical Application Management Specifications (2022 Edition)", readjusting the list of medical technologies restricted for use by hospitals at all levels and canceling artificial intelligence. There are five restricted-level technologies including auxiliary diagnostic technology, which means that the application threshold of artificial intelligence-assisted diagnostic technology will be further relaxed, and the application scenarios are expected to penetrate into more grassroots areas.
Some insiders believe that the application of the Internet and AI in the medical field has enabled more data to be digitized, reducing errors caused by manual proofreading and reducing labor costs. In addition, the value of medical data resources has been further highlighted, creating a wider range of application scenarios for remote diagnosis and treatment, online follow-up diagnosis, etc.
In the context of an aging population and a shortage of medical staff, AI provides new ideas for easing the contradiction between supply and demand of medical resources. AI can bring process improvement and efficiency improvement to the existing medical system, reduce the workload of medical staff, and accelerate the development of drugs and vaccines.
Driven by various development environments, government policy guidance is undoubtedly the leading force in promoting the development of AI medical care. The data shows that the market size of China's AI medical industry will be about 9.5 billion yuan in 2021, and it is expected to reach 38.5 billion yuan in 2025, with a CAGR of 46% from 2020 to 2025, showing a positive and high growth trend.
Under various favorable circumstances, the AI medical field has become a hot topic in the eyes of capital in the secondary market. On November 5, 2021, Eagle Eye Technology, which focuses on artificial intelligence retinal image recognition, was successfully listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and successfully became the first AI medical stock. In addition, Shukun Technology, an AI digital doctor platform company, has officially submitted a prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and plans to list on the Hong Kong main board. Anhan Technology, which independently developed the "Magnetic Capsule Gastroscopy System", is also constantly strengthening the integration of its own technology and AI.
AI technology breakthrough, medical imaging has broad prospects
Judging from the distribution of downstream demand in the domestic AI medical industry, AI medical care is currently widely used on the auxiliary side and the data side. It has a large market share in CDSS (clinical decision support system), smart medical records and medical data intelligence platforms, accounting for 29.8% respectively in 2020. ,21.6%,14.0%. In the future, AI medical applications will focus more on the practical side, including AI medical imaging, AI medical robots, AI pharmaceuticals and other fields.
Some industry analysts said that in the future, AI will be embedded in medical application systems and applied to the construction and application development of hospital core clinical information systems and management systems, electronic medical records and medical record systems, and health and medical big data; on the other hand, independent AI medical application systems have also begun to play a role, such as in the field of medical imaging AI and so on.
In the AI medical industry, medical imaging has always been one of the popular areas of application. With the liberalization and support of policies, the market demand for auxiliary diagnosis and treatment products has increased significantly.
In the core software market size of China's AI medical care in 2020, CDSS market share is 29.8%, and AI medical imaging is 7.1%. It is expected that by 2023 (that is, this year), the AI medical imaging market size will surpass CDSS for the first time and become The product category with the highest market share among AI medical core software.
Data forecasts show that China's artificial intelligence medical imaging industry is expected to increase from RMB 300 million in 2020 to RMB 92.3 billion in 2030, with a compound growth rate of 76.7% in this decade. It is worth mentioning that the AI medical imaging market maintains a high growth rate and has a high degree of capital concentration, and has the best chance of being the first to achieve commercialization.
At present, the annual growth rate of medical imaging data in my country is about 30%, while the annual growth rate of the number of radiologists is only 4.1%. AI medical imaging perfectly solves this pain point. Take ophthalmology as an example. Currently, about 20% of county-level hospitals in my country do not have ophthalmology departments. According to the "China Eye Health White Paper" released in 2020, there are only 44,800 ophthalmologists in my country, and they are concentrated in first- and second-tier cities. The distribution is seriously uneven.
Taking diabetic retinopathy as an example, since there are no obvious symptoms in the early stages, most patients cannot be diagnosed in time through eye examinations. Data show that more than 30% of diabetic patients will be at risk of retinopathy in 2023, but the screening rate is less than 10%.
If a network system for AI retinal image-assisted diagnosis is built and implemented in grassroots medical institutions, patients will no longer need to travel to big cities for diagnosis and treatment. This will not only effectively solve the problem of shortage of medical resources, but also reduce the cost of a single test.
According to Frost & Sullivan's data, the growth of our artificial intelligence medical imaging industry is expected to reach 100 billion yuan in the next ten years; specifically for the retina, this figure will also increase from 76 million yuan in 2023 to 2030. About 34 billion yuan, with a compound growth rate of more than 80%.
The Eagle Eye technology mentioned above combines the principle of retinal imaging to observe chronic diseases with AI technology, detects eye diseases including diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma, and evaluates the cardiovascular system, endocrine system, nervous system and other systemic diseases. Disease risk.
Pay equal attention to implementation supervision, and medical insurance support can promote the accelerated implementation of AI medical treatment
The development of the AI medical industry combines the strengths of medicine, academia, industry and other aspects. The combination of artificial intelligence and medical care is not only extremely demanding in terms of technology, but also a multi-faceted test of real-life scenarios. Therefore, even if mature products have been developed, how to accelerate the implementation of digital health has always been a pain point for the entire industry.
In order to realize commercialization better and more accurately, the coverage of AI medical products in the number of hospitals is key. iResearch data shows that in the AI medical imaging recruitment statistics from 2019 to August 2021, the recruitment quota of top tertiary hospitals in 2019 and 2020 remained at more than 10 million yuan. Affected by the demand for epidemic detection and lung imaging products Due to factors such as a wide audience and high maturity of development technology, the recruitment of AI development software for the pulmonary department reached 12.96 million yuan during the statistical period, followed by the cardiovascular, comprehensive and pathology departments.
From the above data, it can be seen that the main demand for AI medical equipment is the top three hospitals, but it is far from being popularized in lower-level township hospitals and clinics.
The advantage of fundus AI is that the diversity of enterprise implementation scenarios is relatively rich. Whether it is lung imaging, cardiovascular imaging or thoracic imaging, if it needs to be bundled with large-scale hardware equipment for sale, it will usually be located in a top tertiary hospital. Fundus AI has a wider range of choices, and the cost of fundus cameras, its hardware equipment, is relatively low. It can either choose a top-level hospital, or make breakthroughs from primary medical institutions or other big health scenarios to achieve penetration into the primary medical system. This It is also one of the important reasons why fundus AI stands out in the artificial intelligence imaging market.
On the other hand, if AI medical care is to be widely implemented, medical insurance may be the best line of trust between AI medical care, hospitals, and patients.
During the two sessions of this year, Wang Ningli, the world's top ophthalmologist, director of the Ophthalmology Center of Beijing Tongren Hospital, and dean of the School of Ophthalmology of Capital Medical University, submitted a proposal focusing on the early prevention and treatment of blinding eye diseases. He suggested that fundus photography should be included in chronic diseases The management and prevention and control system will be paid by the medical insurance fund, which will achieve great social and economic benefits.
While implementing medical insurance to protect AI medical treatment, how relevant departments supervise digital therapy is also an important cornerstone for the healthy development of the industry in the future. In particular, AI devices are software-based products and must face the characteristics of the Internet industry - rapid product iteration, and all iterations must undergo rigorous verification, and even the impact of re-registration on the enterprise must be confirmed. This requires regulatory authorities to think about how to define digital therapy products and implement relevant data security standards and industry-related regulations on medical big data as soon as possible to standardize the current legal supervision of medical data.
Conclusion
It is foreseeable that artificial intelligence technology is still in the growth stage, and there are still many details to be optimized when it is subdivided into the medical field. It is also necessary to seek innovation and breakthroughs, and to explore the combination of more models and scenarios.
The AI medical industry is a field with long slopes and heavy snow. It is expected that with the blessing of artificial intelligence technology, the intelligent medical industry will usher in more opportunities, launch more high-quality and convenient medical equipment to serve the public, and then promote the high-quality development of my country's medical industry .