BEIJING: China’s fast-growing AI sector has picked up pace in addressing some long-standing headaches facing human beings. This sector is making a contribution by leveraging large language models to offer smart medical services and facilitate developing medicines.
Following the launch of its AI chatbot Ernie, Chinese AI giant Baidu last week rolled out an industry-grade medical large language model called Lingyi, which can analyze and generate patient data to aid diagnosis and treatment and serve as a 24-hour “healthcare manager” for patients.
The company said that the large language model will be available for trial use in both upstream and downstream healthcare sectors, in a bid to improve the digitization and intelligence of the healthcare industry.
Several online medical services platforms have also made forays into AI-empowered large language models.
In May this year, digital healthcare service provider Medlinker unveiled MedGPT that seeks to generate practical diagnostic value in real medical scenarios. In June, counterpart Dingdang Health launched Dingdang HealthGPT and introduced application-based smart pharmacist and nutritionist assistant AI products.
“Modern medicine, life science, and engineering science are highly integrated, which promotes the evolution of a medical model from engineering medicine to intelligent medicine,” said Jin Li, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of Shanghai Medical College of Fudan University, while also adding that AI plays a key leading role in this process. –Agenciecs
