html On August 31, the Alzheimer's Disease Branch of the China Elderly Care Association (ADC) teamed up with Alibaba Damo Academy to launch the country's first Alzheimer's disease AI screening applet, which has passed medical verification and is available on mobile phones. You can complete the screening yourself, which only takes about ten minutes. Experts expressed the hope that this would make up for the lack of primary medical resources and promote large-scale public welfare screening for Alzheimer's disease.
Alzheimer's disease has become a health killer for the elderly in China. A 2020 study in the international medical journal "The Lancet" showed that there were as many as 9.83 million Alzheimer's disease patients in China among the elderly aged 60 and above. Because brain damage is irreversible, Alzheimer's disease is currently difficult to cure, but if detected in advance, the process can be delayed through intervention. Since large-scale screening requires a large investment of medical resources, many areas have limited conditions, especially grassroots and remote areas, which are far from reaching the 80% elderly screening rate advocated by the National Health Commission .
As World Alzheimer’s Month (September) approaches, ADC and Alibaba Damo Academy launch an AI screening applet to lower the screening threshold through technological innovation. The reporter’s experience found that you can start screening by opening Alipay on your mobile phone, searching for “ADC Dementia Screening” and simply filling in the information. The screening requires completing steps such as answering voice questions and drawing a clock, which takes about ten minutes. AI can automatically analyze the situation, and then experts will manually review it, and the results will be available within five working days. If the screening result is high risk, the system will also remind you to go to the hospital for further clinical diagnosis.
Screening result example
"This is the first Alzheimer's disease AI screening app in China. We have conducted thousands of tests in the early stage and passed medical verification. The sensitivity and specificity are both over 80%." Sun Yong'an, deputy chairman and secretary-general of ADC and chief physician of Peking University First Hospital, said that AI screening combines the classic clinical cognitive screening scale with the latest artificial intelligence technology to quickly and effectively assess Alzheimer's disease. Risk of silent disease. Take the classic clock drawing test as an example. It seems simple, but in fact it tests the cognitive ability of the elderly, especially their spatial orientation ability.
Sun Yongan said that offline screening is time-consuming and labor-intensive, requiring the elderly to go to the hospital in person or rely on professional assistance. Now it is easy to operate on mobile phones. He hopes that this tool can be promoted mainly in grassroots and remote areas with insufficient medical resources to solve the problem of large-scale screening.
Senior algorithm engineer at Alibaba DAMO Academy Xu Guohai introduced that Alzheimer’s disease AI screening applies the industry’s cutting-edge multi-modal AI technology and uses joint speech-semantic modeling to evaluate the elderly’s voice answers to avoid problems caused by accents. deviation. They also focused on overcoming the problem of AI recognition of hand-drawn clocks by the elderly. Since the hand-drawn drawings of the elderly are extremely diverse and involve various relative relationships such as outlines, numbers, and hands, it requires experienced experts to accurately judge. Damo Academy AI not only learns the results of expert judgments, but also learns the basis and knowledge of expert judgments, forming explainable AI. It not only knows what is happening, but also why it is happening, and successfully transforms expert knowledge into AI capabilities.
Various hand-painted clocks
According to reports, DAMO Academy has been studying AI screening for Alzheimer’s disease since 2021, and has teamed up with the Zhejiang University School of Public Health team to conduct offline screening in Hangzhou. The research results Published in the international medical journal "Frontiers in Psychiatry" and passed medical professional evaluation. Going a step further this year, DAMO Academy and ADC jointly developed an AI screening applet, changing from offline manual-assisted screening to online self-service screening.
Experts remind: Screening is not equal to clinical diagnosis. Please seek medical treatment in time if necessary.
Access entrance: Open Alipay on your mobile phone and search for "ADC Dementia Screening".
