SINGAPORE: Diagnosing leukaemia as well as diseases such as dengue and Covid-19 may soon become faster and more precise with the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
A good AI-powered software dubbed Blade – produced by Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) plus Taiwanese tech company Asus – can cut the time needed to examine blood for these diseases by half, allowing for earlier clinical intervention for patients.
The process currently needs a laboratory technologist to look at a patient’s bloodstream, which is placed on a piece of film under a microscope, and perform a manual cell count.
Those blood films with abnormal features or unclear medical diagnosis are sent to the reference laboratory or even a haematologist for review.
This can leave the technologists fatigued, possibly leading to a greater chance of error, said TTSH haematology department consultant Eugene Lover.
He informed reporters on Wed (July 6) that this TTSH haematology lab – which works 24 hours a day, seven days a week – handles among 300 and four hundred such blood movies a day.
Cutting tool allows for the procedure to be automated, enabling a technologist to load several blood films into a scanner that converts them into electronic images.
The particular AI analyses the particular films and red flags critical ones, for example cases of leukaemia.
Lab technologists need only review the scans and appropriate any misclassified instances, said Dr Lover, who is also a principal investigator in the eight-member team studying the usage of Blade.
He or she compares the identification of critical instances by Blade in order to tagging people upon Facebook, noting this really is made possible by laboratory technologists painstakingly labelling individual cells in the last three years.
The program was developed using an information set of 337, 700 digital images of peripheral blood tissues from the National Health care Group (NHG), which oversees TTSH.
Differential blood matters to check white bloodstream cell levels – which indicate the existence of infection and disease – are currently 91. 4% accurate, Asus and TTSH mentioned in a media discharge.
Before the relationship with Asus, funding for the project came from various sources, which includes Enterprise Singapore and an award in the National Medical Study Council.
Blade is currently being examined at TTSH and other sites, with programs for it to gain regulating approval in the next couple of years.
The team aims to test Knife in a community setting, with NHG’s Hougang Polyclinic – that has its own laboratory exactly where blood films are examined – likely to get the software this month.
Asus and TTSH also are looking at developing comparable AI-based solutions in the fields of pathology, cytology and microbiology. On Thursday, both formalised their collaboration by signing the three-year memorandum associated with understanding.
Additional projects in the works include those focusing on breast and colon cancer detection.
“We believe that pc science can help a great deal to improve healthcare quality, ” said Asus chief technology officer and corporate vice-president Huang Tai-yi, observing that the company experienced already deployed its smart medical options at 20 hospitals in its native Taiwan.
Associate Teacher Tan Cher Heng, assistant chairman from the medical board to get clinical research plus innovation at TTSH, said the ownership of technology for example AI will allow a healthcare facility to reinvent the practice and enhance care for the community. – The Straits Times (Singapore)/Asia News Network