Kyoto University, Fujitsu launch research project to advance medicine through use of AI

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Kyoto University, Fujitsu Ltd and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd have established the Department of Medical Intelligent Systems, a joint research project at the Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine to use artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of medicine.

The research activities will run for approximately two years and use all types of medical information, including patient data accumulated on electronic medical records collected by Kyoto University Hospital and the Fujitsu Group’s advanced AI technology, Fujitsu Human Centric AI Zinrai.

Through collaboration between Kyoto University’s physicians and bioinformatics researchers and the Fujitsu Group’s AI engineers, the project will leverage this information and use AI to accelerate R&D toward advanced, next-generation medicine, such as creating new approaches to diagnostic support and drug discovery. Fujitsu and Kyoto University aim to apply the knowledge database platform they’ve developed through their joint research and the insights it elicits to related fields, such as health insurance, and broadly put them to use for the benefit of society.

Background

With rapid advances in scientific technology, the digitalization of medical front lines continues to progress, and a wide range of medical information (real world data) is being accumulated. It is strongly anticipated that this trend will bring about advanced, next-generation medical care that will deliver optimal care to patients, stemming/resulting from the combination of this data with revolutionary advances in AI to evaluate and analyze medical information, while applying it to the actual clinical front lines.

Currently, AI has already demonstrated an impressive ability to evaluate and analyze certain types of medical images. At the same time, to build AI that can make more sophisticated determinations, it is necessary to use detailed clinical time series data. Much of this data, however, consists of unstructured information, such as notes written by medical personnel. Moreover, there is not yet any AI technology that, in a practical application, can integrate and link together the huge volumes of various types of data, such as the text and figures in electronic medical records, reports in medical journals, genomic data, and diagnostic images.

To put this data to use, it has become essential to develop AI for medicine through the close collaboration of researchers with a high degree of knowledge of the medical field with AI researchers and engineers.