Doctors Leverage SenseTime AI to Improve and Accelerate COVID-19 Testing

Beijing – February 22, 2020 – SenseTime, a leading global artificial intelligence (AI) company that specializes in computer vision and deep learning, has collaborated with hospitals and medical institutions in Hubei Province and other cities across China to research how AI could assist COVID-19 diagnosis. Within only a week, the company upgraded its SenseCare lung software -- a smart AI-assisted diagnosis application for both common lung diseases and COVID-19 to ease the strain on medical resources amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

CT exam plays a key role in diagnosis and classification of COVID-19 according to the latest Chinese CDC（Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention）coronavirus guidelines. There are approximately 300-400 images from a single CT imaging procedure. A single hospital in Hubei Province may perform 150 CT scans for suspected patients in a day. As a result, doctors and radiologists may need to read thousands of images every day to identify patients with symptoms of the disease. SenseTime’s upgraded SenseCare lung software has been deployed in hospitals across Hubei Province and other hospitals and medical institutions in various cities in China. The complimentary software will be able to reduce doctors’ workload and speed up diagnostics procedures.

The upgraded SenseCare lung software uses image processing technology to identify patients with coronavirus symptoms efficiently and accurately. With the help of AI algorithms, the system provides doctors with auxiliary diagnostics results which can quickly identify suspected lesions from the CT images. The AI system can also measure the quantification and severity of lung involvement in the disease, such as the volume and density of the lesions in two lungs to provide doctors with comprehensive analysis of the findings.

SenseCare lung software has been remotely supporting hospitals in Hubei province by partnering with medical imaging cloud service platform. In addition, hospitals and medical institutions in other cities and provinces, including Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Shandong, Hebei and Fujian are adopting the software directly.

“Our goal is to develop AI for good and it is encouraging that AI technologies are helping to support doctors during this crisis,” said Dr. Zhang Shaoting, Vice President and Deputy Head of Research, SenseTime. SenseTime has acknowledged that AI has dramatically improved the effectiveness, accuracy and speed of current analysis of CT scans, but this diagnostic approach of relying merely on CT scan is not yet perfect given COVID-19 symptoms are proving difficult and complicated to analyze. “We are partnering with doctors on research about comprehensive AI analysis referring to multi-modality medical data including medical record, clinical symptoms, and medical images to increase the accuracy and effectiveness of current testing methods in the fight against COVID-19,” concluded Dr. Zhang.