Both a hospital in Kuala Lumpur and the country’s health ministry are going heavily into AI-based solutions to boost healthcare standards.
In its mission to advance the adoption of analytics and AI in clinical and healthcare research on COVID-19, Hospital Tunku Azizah Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia has implemented solutions from Skymind Holdings (Skymind), which claims to have the world’s first dedicated Artificial Intelligence (AI) ecosystem builder.
Running on systems from United Imaging Intelligence, the solution enables machine learning and deep learning applications in the Axial AI system that employs Skymind’s Eclipse DL4J technology.
It supposedly takes less than 30 minutes to install the AI Supercomputer to work on-premise.
Said Shawn Tan, Chief Executive Officer of Skymind: “Using our platform Eclipse DL4J, we have designed the Axial AI system to be used by the people who work with patient’s data and have the contextual understanding, including doctors and clinicians. With the platform, we give them the ability to bring all the relevant patient information together, curate the data and use the power of AI to support precision diagnosis, early intervention and greater medical efficiency.”
The Axial AI system is not built specifically for CoVid-19 research purposes, but being a software development toolkit, it can also be used to develop AI diagnosis systems for other diseases.
Being an on-premise solution, the Axial AI system delivered to the Hospital Tunku Azizah ensures that no other entity apart from the hospital staff has access to patient’s sensitive data which is in compliance with Malaysia’s Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA).
Ministry-level Healthcare AI
At the policy level, Malaysia’s Ministry of Health has recently been engaged in exploiting AI. Skymind and the Skymind Laboratory of Neurobionix Research in Shanghai, China (Skymind Neurobionix), recently announced their intention to collaborate and provide support for the use of the Axial AI system and related services to the Malaysian health ministry.
The plan involves an artificial intelligence system that has been used at more than 60 specialized COVID-19 hospitals across China including Huoshenshan Hospital and Leishenshan Hospital in Wuhan.
The collaboration will see Skymind Neurobionix extend the knowledge and expertise of its team led by Prof Xu Zhang, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who combated the COVID-19 in China.
The outcome of this collaboration is to link clinical researchers in Malaysia to the research community in China. Subsequently, this collaboration would be extended into the broader scope of AI-based research in clinical and medical fields. This system is not specific only for COVID-19 but it can also help with other illnesses like cancer detection, in partnership with Malaysia’s National Institute of Health.
Malaysia’s Director-General of Ministry of Health, Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said: “We are seeing a strong response from the private sector who are lending a helping hand in Malaysia’s fight against COVID-19. The contribution from Skymind will help the medical staff conducting clinical research to provide useful information and understanding of COVID-19 in Malaysia. This will be a steep learning curve for us all within the health sector. With all hands on deck, we are doing everything we can to ensure the safety of all people.”
