Yitu Healthcare Launches Pediatric Health Intelligence Cloud Platform to Empower China's Pediatrics with 'AI + Cloud'
Once AI has achieved results in a specific disease area, what will be the next product form or problem that AI healthcare aims to address? On March 26, at the “VB100 New Year Strategy Launch Day” hosted by VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) in Beijing, Dr. Fang Cong, Vice President of Yitu Healthcare, answered this question.
“Yitu Healthcare has previously established a strong presence in multiple product lines, including lung cancer and bone age assessment. As various point-solution applications have been launched, we aim to integrate artificial intelligence technology with clinical scenarios to address end-to-end closed-loop challenges across entire care pathways. For our initial scenario, we selected pediatrics.”
From Single-Point Tasks to Full-Scenario Services: Full-Stack AI Technology Is the Core Driver of Healthcare Industry Upgrading. At the launch event, in response to the imbalance between supply and demand in pediatric medical resources, Yitu Healthcare officially unveiled its Intelligent Cloud Platform for Children’s Health.
Dr. Fang Cong, Vice President of Yitu Healthcare
Leveraging Yitu Healthcare’s robust technological reserves in computer vision, natural language processing, and automatic speech recognition, this platform empowers pediatric medical institutions across China through a suite of AI products spanning the entire pediatric diagnosis and treatment workflow, along with a powerful intelligent cloud platform. It delivers comprehensive, scenario-based AI services covering pre-consultation, intra-consultation, and post-consultation phases—from child health assessments to pediatric diagnostic and therapeutic services. This initiative aims to comprehensively enhance the efficiency of pediatric care and the diagnostic and treatment capabilities of primary healthcare institutions in China, alleviate the workload of pediatric healthcare professionals, and enable more Chinese families to access high-quality pediatric medical services.
High-quality pediatric diagnosis and treatment resources in China have long been extremely scarce. According to the White Paper on the Current Status of Pediatric Resources in China, there are only 135,000 pediatricians nationwide, while the population of children aged 0–14 reaches 260 million. On average, each pediatrician serves 2,600 children. Issues such as high workloads and elevated professional risks have long plagued pediatricians, leading to an alarming rate of attrition. Meanwhile, parents struggle immensely to access quality pediatric care, with appointments with pediatric specialists being exceedingly difficult to secure.
Dr. Fang Cong emphasized, “Pediatrics is a particularly typical representation of the severe imbalance between medical supply and demand in China. Moreover, pediatrics is often referred to as a ‘silent specialty,’ since pediatric patients themselves are often unable to clearly articulate their conditions, requiring parents to relay information on their behalf. These characteristics make it an ideal scenario for the application of artificial intelligence technology. From its inception, Yitu Healthcare has been committed to providing world-class solutions to world-class medical challenges.”
Faced with a series of issues such as supply-demand imbalance, how can we address these concerns? The emergence of the Intelligent Cloud Platform for Children's Health may alleviate this public health challenge.
Dr. Fang Cong stated, “After years of development, Yitu Healthcare has established a comprehensive portfolio of AI-powered pediatric products spanning the entire continuum of care, both within and outside hospital settings. Currently, this cloud platform offers dozens of AI services, including intelligent triage, smart pre-consultation interviews, AI-assisted pre-diagnostic testing, and voice-enabled electronic medical records, covering scenarios across pre-diagnosis, intra-diagnosis, post-diagnosis, hospital management, and clinical research. These efforts will further accelerate the intelligent transformation of pediatrics in China, empowering every step of in-hospital and out-of-hospital care with advanced AI solutions, benefiting both healthcare providers and patients, and alleviating the challenges associated with pediatric healthcare access.”
Upon further investigation, the cloud platform can interact with parents using multimodal information during the pre-consultation phase, enablingIntelligent Consultation; During consultation, the pediatric intelligent stratified diagnostic model trained on massive datasets and the cloud platform integrating the expertise of top pediatricians can intelligently assess children's growth and development, achievingIntelligent Diagnosis of General Pediatric Diseases, significantly enhancing pediatric diagnostic capabilities; post-consultation, the cloud platform can continuously empower grassroots pediatrics, enablingIntelligent Follow-upwhile simultaneously enabling the transition from grassroots levels to centralized hubsSmart Referral, ensuring that every Chinese child has access to high-quality medical services.
“This marks a major breakthrough centered on pediatric patients, following the AI healthcare industry’s earlier successes in addressing single tasks and individual diseases or anatomical sites,” said Dr. Fang Cong. “Yitu Healthcare will continue to empower China’s pediatric health sector with high-quality medical AI products, providing robust AI technical support for the development of pediatrics in China.”
In terms of practical implementation, the SaaS-based health scenario services powered by Yitu Healthcare’s Children’s Health Intelligent Cloud Platform have been deployed at iKang Guobin. Currently, the Pediatric Health Intelligent Cloud Platform has also entered pilot use in multiple regions, including Guangdong, Zhejiang, and Shanghai. Among them, care.aiTMThe Intelligent Diagnostic System for Child Growth and Development has been deployed for pilot use in over 100 medical institutions. Among the top ten pediatric hospitals listed in the 2018 Fudan University Hospital Rankings, nine have adopted our Intelligent Diagnostic System for Child Growth and Development.
At the press conference, Professor Liu Shiyuan, Incoming Chair of the Chinese Society of Radiology, Chairman of the China Medical Imaging AI Industry-Academia-Research-Application Innovation Alliance, and Director of the Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology & Nuclear Medicine at Shanghai Changzheng Hospital, attended the event in its entirety and delivered a speech.
Professor Liu Shiyuan extended his congratulations on the launch of the Children’s Health Intelligent Cloud Platform in his address. He pointed out that, with the advancement of artificial intelligence, it is crucial for medical professionals to integrate with medical AI. In the future, the China Medical Imaging AI Industry-Academia-Research-Application Innovation Alliance will continue to serve as a vital link and bridge, enabling artificial intelligence to take root, flourish, and bear fruit in the field of medical imaging, thereby achieving clinical application. Ultimately, the alliance aims to make further breakthroughs and contributions to improving healthcare quality, reducing medical costs, and benefiting a broader population.