Source: Department of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data, ZOC
Written by: Xiaoman Huang, Department of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data, ZOC
Proofread by: Jiawei Wang
Edited by: Xianjing Wei


A list of China's top 10 medical science and technology news events of 2019 was released by a national health newspaper recently. The world ’s first AI-assisted multicenter randomized controlled trial was included in the list. It was performed by the AI team, that is led by Prof. Yizhi Liu and Prof. Haotian Lin from our center.

The researchers developed an artificial intelligence (AI) platform named by CC-Cruiser for diagnosing childhood cataracts and providing risk stratification and treatment recommendations, based on real data of a large number of patients, and opened the world's first AI outpatient clinic, applying the platform to the clinical evaluation of patients. The enrolled pediatric patients were randomized (1:1) to receive a diagnosis and treatment recommendation from either CC-Cruiser or senior consultants with over 5 years of clinical experience in pediatric ophthalmology. The accuracy of the diagnosis, the time required for the diagnosis, and patient satisfaction, which was determined by the mean rating in the two outpatient clinics, were compared. It was found out that the accuracies of cataract diagnosis and treatment determination in real clinical outpatients was 87.4%, and the mean time for receiving a diagnosis from AI platform was significantly less than that from senior consultants. The patients were satisfied with the overall medical service quality provided by the AI platform, typically with its time-saving feature in cataract diagnosis.

CC-Cruiser is an ophthalmic AI platform developed by the medical artificial intelligence team from our center using deep learning.

As the earliest medical AI R&D and application institute in China, ZOC has opened the world’s first artificial intelligence clinic, and led this multicenter randomized controlled trial. This trial was performed in five Chinese ophthalmic clinics from different areas to represent the diversity of healthcare settings across China, which verified the effectiveness and feasibility of CC-Cruiser in real-world clinical practice. It puts forward important methods and standards of medical AI from research to clinical application. This is also the world's first medical artificial intelligence multicenter randomized controlled trial for exploring the clinical transformation and application standards of artificial intelligence.

The result was officially published as cover article in EClinicalMedicine (ECM), the sub-journal of Lancet in March 2019, with the cover story of Medical AI must undergo such a rigorous clinical trial to evaluate its real-world diagnostic capabilities before being put into clinical application. The relationship between AI and human doctors is complementary. AI would help doctors provide better medical services, and they work together to provide better care for the world."