China's fast-growing AI sector has picked up pace in addressing some long-standing issues facing the healthcare industry.

In terms of medical AI, China has carried out applications in clinical assisted diagnosis and treatment, public health intelligent services and medical intelligent management, with concrete results achieved, according to Shen Jianfeng, an official with the National Health Commission (NHC).

The NHC will improve the mechanism design related to medical AI services and explore their promotion by strengthening sci-tech collaborative innovation and encouraging cross-industry integration to achieve a well-regulated development, Shen said.

"Modern medicine, life science and engineering science are highly integrated, which promotes the evolution of a medical model from engineering medicine to intelligent medicine," said Jin Li, academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of Shanghai Medical College of Fudan University, while also adding that AI plays a key leading role in this process.

AI language models for medical services 

Following the launch of its AI chatbot Ernie, Chinese AI giant Baidu this month rolled out an industry-grade medical large language model called Lingyi, which can analyze and generate patient data to aid diagnosis and treatment and serve as a 24-hour "healthcare manager" for patients.

The company said the large language model will be available for trial use in both upstream and downstream healthcare sectors, in a bid to improve the digitization and intelligence of the healthcare industry.

Several online medical services platforms have also made forays into AI-empowered large language models.

In May this year, digital healthcare service provider Medlinker unveiled MedGPT, which is designed to generate practical diagnostic value in real medical scenarios. In June, counterpart Dingdang Health launched Dingdang HealthGPT and introduced application-based smart pharmacist and nutritionist assistant AI products.

AI boosts pharmaceutical efficiency

In addition to daily-life medical services, some tech firms have sought to boost pharmaceutical effectiveness and efficiency through AI.

Pharmolix, a biomedical start-up incubated by the Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University, has developed Chat Drug Design (ChatDD), a computing product that seeks to assist and promote conversational biomedical research and development.

The ChatDD effectively links the knowledge of experts and large language models through human-machine collaborative dialogue, pioneering a new path for drug research and development, said AIR's dean Zhang Yaqin.

Drug development is a field that can deeply integrate many academic articles and data to generate good outcomes, as the large language model has incorporated more nuanced and sophisticated data and can offer molecular design optimization, according to Nie Zaiqing, Pharmolix's chief scientist.

Some governments have sought to keep pace with the latest innovations in the healthcare sector.

Home to two zones of pharmaceutical and life science innovation, Shanghai has been a pioneer among Chinese provincial-level regions in the exploration of deep integration of AI and healthcare.

Shanghai will develop AI algorithms and large language models suitable for life science problems, provide efficient, accurate and comprehensible algorithm services, and promote innovative applications in medical big data, medical imaging, gene sequencing, and drug research and development, according to Zhang Ying, deputy director of Shanghai's Municipal Commission of Economy and Information.

(With input from Xinhua)