Shanghai Shibei Hospital Partners with Airdoc to Establish AI Ophthalmology Demonstration Base for Chronic Disease Screening in Jing'an District

On October 15, 2017, the “2017 Ophthalmic Imaging Summit Forum,” hosted by the Macular Group of the Ophthalmology Professional Committee of the Cross-Strait Medical and Health Exchange Association and the Ophthalmic Imaging and Information Subcommittee of the Ophthalmology Professional Committee of the China Non-Public Medical Institutions Association, and organized by Shanghai Jing’an District Shibei Hospital, Yangpu Hospital Affiliated to Tongji University, the Visual Rehabilitation Group of the Ophthalmology Branch of the Shanghai Medical Association, and the District and County Group of the Ophthalmology Branch of the Shanghai Medical Association, was held at the Shibei High-Tech Business Center in Jing’an District, Shanghai.

In addition to lectures and discussions on hot topics and cutting-edge issues in clinical ophthalmology, artificial intelligence (AI) emerged as a highlight of the Ophthalmology Summit Forum for the first time. Prior to the forum, Shanghai Jing’an District Shibei Hospital announced a partnership with Airdoc, a leading AI enterprise in the healthcare sector, to establish a demonstration base for AI applications in ophthalmology. This initiative lays a solid foundation for the subsequent use of AI technology to conduct population-wide screening for chronic diseases in Jing’an District.

Airdoc - Plaque Unveiling Ceremony at Shanghai Jing'an District Shibei Hospital

With the gradual advancement of technology and the overall progress of human material civilization, achieving a higher quality of healthy living and access to comprehensive medical services has become a shared global aspiration. However, unlike many other technological fields, the pace of technological transformation in healthcare has been relatively slow, as medical services are directly linked to every individual’s life, health, and safety.

After more than 60 years of development, artificial intelligence technology has gradually emerged across various technological fields. AI-powered solutions have already gained prominence in the market, particularly in areas such as autonomous driving, facial recognition, and smart healthcare. Similarly, the widespread adoption and advancement of AI technology have made it possible to transform medical services.

In July 2017, the State Council issued the Development Plan for New-Generation Artificial Intelligence, which identified intelligent healthcare as one of the key areas for development. The plan calls for the promotion and application of new AI-driven models and methods in treatment, and for the establishment of a rapid and precise intelligent healthcare system. The research and development of human-machine collaborative clinical intelligent diagnosis and treatment solutions—achieving capabilities such as intelligent medical image recognition, pathological subtyping, and intelligent multidisciplinary consultations—has become an integral part of China’s national artificial intelligence development strategy.

Artificial intelligence has achieved image recognition results in the laboratory stage that are comparable to those of top human physicians. For instance, the cover of Nature magazine in late January 2017 featured a paper on AI-based skin cancer identification. By training a specialized deep neural network on 129,000 images from 2,000 different skin cancer cases, the system accomplished three diagnostic tasks: distinguishing keratinocyte carcinomas, distinguishing melanomas, and classifying melanomas using dermoscopic images. In all three tasks, the accuracy of this AI algorithm was on par with that of human dermatologists. Another example is the research team led by Professor Liu Yizhi from Sun Yat-sen University and Xidian University, who developed an AI-assisted diagnostic platform for congenital cataracts using deep learning algorithms. This platform provides diagnostic recommendations and treatment plans based on uploaded images. Their original research paper was featured on the cover of Nature Biomedical Engineering this February.

To accelerate the clinical adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, Airdoc has collaborated with dozens of top-tier medical institutions and leveraged the expertise of hundreds of specialists to develop multiple AI algorithms for medical image recognition. These algorithms have already been implemented in clinical practice across numerous primary healthcare facilities. Today, Airdoc and Shanghai Shibei Hospital have jointly established a demonstration base for AI applications in ophthalmology, aiming to provide residents of Jing’an District with a novel healthcare experience through chronic disease screening.

China boasts the world’s largest healthcare system, with nearly 8 billion medical consultations recorded in 2016. To ensure the more efficient operation of this system, numerous challenges remain to be addressed. The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) has effectively helped mitigate disparities in medical technical capabilities among primary care institutions. Airdoc is committed to empowering these grassroots healthcare facilities by leveraging AI technology to strengthen their service capacity, thereby shifting the focus toward proactive health promotion and disease prevention at the community level.

Shanghai Shibei Hospital is a comprehensive hospital located in Jing’an District. The hospital currently offers services in ophthalmology, gastroenterology, cardiology, respiratory medicine, general surgery, orthopedics, urology, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, proctology, integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine, oncology, and infectious diseases. The Ophthalmology Application Demonstration Base, unveiled at the forum, will operate under a new model: leveraging Airdoc’s artificial intelligence to interpret medical images and provide auxiliary diagnostic recommendations. This technology assists ophthalmologists in identifying image features more quickly, efficiently, and accurately, thereby reducing physicians’ workload and allowing them to devote more energy to patient treatment. Through the demonstrative role of this base, Shanghai Shibei Hospital aims to deliver more efficient medical services to residents of Jing’an District and showcase clinical application scenarios of artificial intelligence for healthcare institutions across China.

The forum also hosted a training workshop on AI-based screening, inviting ophthalmologists and general practitioners from primary community healthcare service centers across all districts of Shanghai. Airdoc provided on-site demonstrations and explanations of its AI technology. Additionally, it offered free installation of the Airdoc automated fundus image recognition system for diabetic retinopathy to primary community healthcare service centers in Shanghai that registered for the workshop.

Airdoc On-site Training Photos