AI Case Study

"Infervision, a four-year-old Beijing startup, has amassed more than a million scans from Chinese hospitals that it’s using to train and test algorithms. Gathering medical data is much easier for Chinese companies than for their US counterparts, because patient populations are larger and the burden of privacy regulations smaller.

“In the US, particularly for big academic hospitals, you have to go through so many processes and it can take a really long time to access data,” says Yufeng Deng, Infervision’s chief scientist. Chinese institutions do take steps to protect patient privacy, such as anonymizing records used in research, and those protections are becoming stronger, he says. But they are not bound by as many rules and external regulatory processes. “In China it’s less well-defined,” Deng says.

To create its algorithm to identify lung nodules, Infervision gathered more than 400,000 lung scans from Chinese partners, such as leading Beijing research center Peking Union Medical College Hospital. Over two years, it then sent each image for review by three radiologists at its Beijing office. Their annotations created the feedstock to train and test image-processing algorithms, in the same way internet companies train systems to recognize cats, dogs, and people. Infervision has published peer reviewed studies in Chinese and US journals on its algorithms' performance.

Infervision’s software is intended to speed up the work of radiologists, not make diagnoses on its own—Deng says he can’t imagine AI being ready to do that within a decade. The company is in the process of seeking FDA approval to market its product in the US.

In the meantime, it will provide software to Wake, Stanford Children’s Hospital, and other US partners interested in testing the tool for free. The startup has also opened offices in Germany and Japan. In China, Infervision is refining its lung-analysis software to look for other things, like bone fractures and emphysema, and testing algorithms that analyze brain scans for signs of stroke.

At Wake Radiology in North Carolina, roughly 50 doctors scrutinize x-rays and other images for local medical providers. Within a few weeks, they should start to get help on some lung CT scans from machine-learning algorithms that highlight potentially cancerous tissue nodules.

Deng of Infervision says that the startup refined its algorithms with around 2,000 US-sourced images to adapt them to American patients and imaging equipment. Wake and other partners will provide feedback on any errors radiologists spot in its recommendations."