The deep application of medical AI and big data depends on high-quality data and the accumulation of medical knowledge and industry experience. DHCtech, which has been deeply involved in the fields of medical big data and artificial intelligence for a long time, is expected to play a greater role in this respect.

The debut of CHATGPT has had a huge impact on the whole world, including the medical industry. In recent months, a number of Big factories launched a large model of medical-related, medical AI suddenly seems to be second to none. The deep application of medical AI and big data depends on the accumulation of high-quality data, medical knowledge and industry experience. DHCtech, which has long been involved in medical big data and artificial intelligence, is expected to be even more valuable.

The picture shows the signing ceremony of strategic cooperation between DHCtech and SNOMED International. From the bottom to the left: Liara Tutina, CEO of SNOMED International's Asia-Pacific Customer Relations Department, Shi Wenzhao, Chairman and CEO of DHCtech, and Gong Meng Chun, Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Information Officer of DHCtech.

At the China Hospital Information Network Conference (CHIMA 2023) held in Fuzhou recently, DHCtech and SNOMED International held a signing ceremony of the strategic cooperation agreement. The cooperation includes: 1. DHCtech continues to distribute SNOMED CT agency licenses in Chinese mainland; 2. DHCtech provides training, assessment and certification services for professional courses and terminology experts of SNOMED CT in Chinese mainland.

Liara Tutina, chief executive and Global Education Officer of SNOMED International in Asia Pacific, said that the partnership with DHCtech will bring widespread application of International standards to China to support the development of healthcare in China, SNOMED CT is expected to play a more important role and  deliver even greater value in the development of medical and health care in China.

Shi Wenzhao, chairman and CEO of DHCtech, said at the signing ceremony that he looks forward to working with many medical institutions and industry practitioners to promote the standardization of clinical terms in China and deepen medical big data and artificial intelligence applications in China, accelerate the process of high-level domestic medical treatment.

Stay true to its founding mission: high-quality data and medical experience accumulation are the key elements of deep application of medical AI and big data

The application of artificial intelligence in the medical field has been developing. IBM Watson, a major attempt to combine medicine with artificial intelligence, has an embarrassing development process. In 2011, Watson declared that he had reached the knowledge level of second-year medical students, and stepped into one of the most complicated application scenarios of medicine-cancer, and began to use it in many medical institutions in the United States. In February 2017, MD Anderson Cancer Center announced that it would stop cooperating with IBM Watson, pointing out that Watson's cancer treatment proposal was not satisfactory. Since then, a large number of medical institution customers have begun to cancel their contracts with Watson; In 2022, IBM sold some Watson Health business assets. Insiders analyzed that Watson's failure may stem from IBM's choice of medical care as a breakthrough. The complexity of medical care is beyond the imagination of most technicians. There are no medical gene technology manufacturers and lack of massive medical experience. IBM's attempt at medical artificial intelligence ended up rashly.

Since then, CHATGPT has rekindled the passion about AI in medicine, but for the better part of a year, it hasn’t rocked the scenes in the medical industry. "Data isn't good enough to utilize while being need", Does domestic medical AI rely on big data or large amount of data? Finally, it is gradually found that without high-quality medical data, it is very difficult to use the intelligent artificial intelligence.

The accumulation of high-quality data and domain knowledge is a key factor for the effective implementation of new generation technologies and applications such as big data and artificial intelligence. The application of artificial intelligence requires high-quality data and no accumulation of medical industry experience. DHCtech has been deeply involved in the field of medical big data and artificial intelligence for a long time, benefited from the long-term accumulation of medical big data and domain knowledge, as well as the profound insight into the development of the medical industry, paid attention to the standardization of medical terms in the early stage of the development of domestic medical artificial intelligence, and joined hands with SNOMED International to promote the standardization of clinical terms in China for many years, realize the standardized application of single-center and multi-center data, deepen the application of medical big data and artificial intelligence in China, and accelerate the high-level process of domestic medical care.

Value guidance: SNOMED CT helps standardize clinical terminology and deepen the application of medical big data and AI

Liara Tutina introduced that Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) is the most comprehensive clinical terminology standard in the world, which is developed, owned and managed by the non-profit organization SNOMED International.

SNOMED CT enables consistent expression of clinical content in clinical information systems, health data and analysis platforms, and interoperable solutions, it has been mapped to ICD-10, ICD-11, ICNP2, LOINC and so on. It can cover almost all clinical information of patients. Therefore, it can play a valuable role in clinical data management and exchange, decision support, big data analysis, clinical management and clinical research.

SNOMED CT has been used in more than 85 countries and regions because of its compatibility, strong logic and more international vision.

Liara Tutina indicated at the signing ceremony that it is very important for China to have standardized clinical records to exchange and analyze clinical data. The nationwide application of data standardization will be beneficial to the development of evidence-based medicine, population monitoring and clinical research.

"The vast majority of high-level medical research and big data applications in China are based on the medical terminology system and specifications of SNOMED CT. Our breakthroughs in medical big data and medical AI are inseparable from the support of SNOMED CT." Shi Wenzhao said at the signing ceremony.

Shi Wenzhao believed that SNOMED CT is the origin of the whole medical data, which not only represents the language we speak, but also reflects the relationship between words, that is, knowledge. He said, "SNOMED CT is to control medical data ontology by language and knowledge."

SNOMED CT can contribute to the development of medicine in our country as follows:

Firstly, sharing and communication of clinical information: SNOMED CT provides unified medical terms and codes, which can promote the sharing and communication of clinical information. In the medical field, there are differences in the use of terms between different medical institutions and professionals, which brings challenges to the transmission and understanding of clinical information. The introduction of SNOMED CT makes it possible to unify medical terms, promotes more accurate and seamless communication and sharing of medical information, and improves the quality and efficiency of medical services.

Secondly, the support of clinical decision-making: The coding system of SNOMED CT allows the medical information system to associate clinical data with standardized terms, which can comprehensively and standardly represent the patient's state and help to improve the accuracy and consistency of clinical decision-making, thus improving the ability of clinical decision-making support and promoting the standardization of medical practice.

Thirdly, disease monitoring and research: the use of SNOMED CT can promote disease monitoring and epidemiological research. By associating clinical data with SNOMED CT codes, large-scale disease-related data can be collected, summarized and analyzed quickly and accurately. This is helpful to discover the potential trends and patterns of diseases, provide effective public health interventions, and promote the formulation of strategies for disease prevention and control.

Finally, medical education and training: the introduction of SNOMED CT is very important for medical education and training. Medical professionals can master the international standard medical terminology and coding system by learning and using SNOMED CT, and improve the standardization level of clinical practice. This is helpful to cultivate the international vision and clinical ability of medical professionals and improve the quality and safety of medical services.

Meanwhile, he also believed that SNOMED CT can provide core support for the development of China's health care big data industry in terms of standardized data, data interoperability, data analysis and mining, innovative application and decision support.

Deep cultivation in China: DHCtech helps to standardize medical terms in China and improve the scientific research level of large teaching hospitals

DHCtech focuses on the development of forward-looking technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, machine learning, federal learning, and multi-modality, and adheres to the construction of a medical terminology standard system according to international common standards, forming a closed loop of multi-group and multi-modal big data fusion-governance-analysis. DHCtech has cooperated with more than 1,800 customers and accumulated more than 300 million patients' experience in data management. Successfully declared and successfully completed a number of national key R&D projects such as the 13th Five-Year Plan, the 14th Five-Year Plan, the Science and Technology Innovation 2030 and the 863 Plan. DHCtech's data precipitation and technical experience cover the fields of special diseases such as tumors, rare diseases, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, and kidney diseases. It has participated in the construction of several national special disease database platforms, supported the formulation of standard data sets for several special diseases, and built the foundation of "data bank".

During the pandemic of COVID-19 in 2020, the project "Hubei Honghu Epidemic Prevention and Control System (HHS) based on big data", which was guided by Southern Hospital of Southern Medical University and supported by DHCtech, was selected as the World Health Organization's 2022 Health Medical Technology Innovation Competition. Cloud-Based System for Effective Surveillance and Control of COVID-19: Useful Experiences From Hubei, China is an academic paper that concisely summarizes Honghu's innovative model. It was selected as the Best Paper of the year by the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA), selected into the IMIA2021 Yearbook, and even on the list of the WHO Western Pacific Innovation Challenge in 2022, which delivered the strongest anti-epidemic voice and positive energy of science and technology in China to the world.

Liara Tutina noted that the project was completed in a short period of time, demonstrating well the role of SNOMED CT in the management of clinically relevant use cases with COVID-19 .

DHCtech and SNOMED International have been working together since 2017 and have achieved significant results. DHCtech has trained a large number of SNOMED CT professionals over the years, and they have become the backbone of data standardization in large medical institutions and medical information/Big Data Enterprises. Large-scale projects such as national kidney disease big data platform, tumor big data platform, cardiovascular big data research platform and rare disease registration system have been carried out by using SNOMED CT, which has played an important role in promoting clinical research in China. Large-scale technical cases have been carried out in some high-level teaching hospitals by using SNOMED CT, such as the hospital-wide multimodal big data center of southern hospital; Using SNOMED CT to support some important national large-scale projects, the implementation of 12 national key R&D projects undertaken by Shenzhou Medical is basically based on SNOMED CT to carry out data governance.

Looking forward to the future: promote domestic medicine to a high level and improve the coordinated development of global medicine

Both sides are confident about the future application of SNOMED CT in China.

Liara Tutina said that Chinese mainland has a vast population and region, and SNOMED CT has broad application prospects and will provide better medical services. SNOMED International and DHCtech will work together to promote the application of SNOMED CT in China at the levels of big data analysis, health data exchange and medical research.

Gong Meng Chun, senior vice president and chief medical information officer of DHCtech, predicted that the development of SNOMED CT in China in the next decade may be as follows:

Policy support and promotion: the state attaches importance to and supports the development of standardization and interoperability of medical information, and expects that SNOMED CT, as an internationally accepted clinical terminology standard, will be supported and promoted by more industries.

Integration of medical information system: With the continuous advancement of medical informatization, China's medical information system will become more popular and mature. SNOMED CT will become one of the core standards of various medical information systems, and the data interaction between different systems will be more seamless and efficient. It is hoped that more medical institutions and information enterprises will use SNOMED CT coding to record clinical information, so as to realize the consistency and sharing of clinical data.

Scientific research and clinical practice: SNOMED CT will be widely used in medical research and clinical practice. Researchers and clinicians can use the clinical terms and codes of SNOMED CT for data analysis, disease classification and clinical decision support. This will promote the development of medical research and improve the quality and efficiency of clinical practice.

Application of medical big data: With the continuous progress of big data technology, SNOMED CT will be combined with medical big data to provide more data bases for medical research, epidemiological analysis and artificial intelligence applications. Through the large-scale analysis of SNOMED CT coding, we can reveal the disease model, the effectiveness of clinical guidelines and the distribution of medical resources, thus providing more accurate basis for medical decision-making and policy-making.

International exchange and cooperation: China's medical institutions and standards organizations will actively participate in the exchange and cooperation of the international SNOMED CT community. China's medical experts and technical team will work with their international counterparts to study the application and development of SNOMED CT, and promote China's contribution and influence.

At HIMSS 2023 in mid-April, Shi Wenzhao was impressed that medical AI and big data were the most discussed topics. "We are looking forward to future collaborations between DHCtech and SNOMED International to better promote the standardization of clinical terminology, advance the development of medical AI and big data in our country, and promote high-level development of domestic medicine." he said.