Thai PM visits Siriraj Hospital to inspect AI-Assisted COVID-19 diagnosis technology

17th April 2020, Bangkok – Prime Minister and Defence Minister Gen Prayut Chan-o-cha, Deputy Prime Minister and Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, and Digital Economy and Society Minister Buddhipongse Punnakanta visit Siriraj Hospital to observe and follow-up on the utilization of the AI-Assisted solution provided by Digital Economy and Society Ministry and Huawei Technologies (Thailand) Co. Ltd., which aims to help Thai medical team on the COVID-19 initial diagnosis by analyzing whether the patient is at risk of infection. This technology was officially used in many hospitals in China including Wuhan and other cities, and is now already installed at Ramathibodi Hospital and Siriraj Hospital, with plans to be implemented at other hospitals in Thailand.

The AI-Assisted technology collected 20,000 CTs examples of patients' lungs, of which 4,000 examples are confirmed cases. This allows the medical staff to process CT scans for patients, with the system automatically analysing the CT scan results by comparing with all existing examples, and deduce whether the patient is at risk of having a COVID-19 infection.

The process only takes 25 seconds per case, as it is supported by high speed and high accuracy 5G network. Therefore, this AI technology can greatly reduce the risk of infection for both Thai people and Thai medical staff, as it allows medical staff to keep their distance from patient while processing the CT Scan. Following the scan, only patients with found high risks of infection will go into the process of conducting a secretion test, which require at least 48 hours to get the confirmed result.

The AI-assisted solution based on HUAWEI CLOUD technology is co-developed by Huawei and HY Medical, and leverages the computer vision and medical image analysis technologies to segment the multiple pulmonary ground glass opacities (GGOs) and lung consolidation and make quantitative evaluations through CTs of patients' lungs. More than 20 hospitals in China have adopted this technology to handle the COVID-19 and after continuous training and optimization, the solution has become more efficient with classification of accuracy rate at 96% and with DICE score higher than 85.

In addition, the 5G network also enhances the effectiveness of medical service in hospital by guaranteeing the quality of a high-speed connection, high reliability and low latency. The healthcare system will benefit from improved response times with 3-4 times uploaded efficiency – when compared to WiFi, and better patient monitoring, data collection and analytics, remote collaboration and resource allocation.