Chinese Tech company, London firm work on AI to diagnose Parkinson’s disease

Hope may be on the way for speedy diagnosis for Parkinson’s disease patients, as a Chinese tech giant, Tencent and London medical firm Medopad have teamed up to use artificial intelligence in the diagnosis of the disease.

According to reports, a camera captures the way patients move their hands to determine the severity of their symptoms, just as research team has trained the system with existing videos of patients who have been assessed by doctors, working with King’s College Hospital in London.

“We use the AI to measure the deterioration of Parkinson’s disease patients without the patient wearing any sensors or devices,” explains Dr Wei Fan, head of the Tencent Medical AI lab.

The aim is to speed up a motor function assessment process, which usually takes more than half an hour.

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Using smartphone technology developed by Medopad, the hope is that patients could be assessed within three minutes – and might not even have to attend a hospital.

Medopad is a London-based firm that has been developing apps and wearable devices to monitor patients with various medical conditions.

Reports however say Medopad, though growing fast, is a minnow compared with Tencent, which is spearheading China’s huge investment in AI.

Medopad’s chief executive, Dan Vahdat says that there was no British company that could match what Tencent offered as a partner.

“Our ambition is to impact a billion patients around the world – and to be able to get to that kind of scale we need to work with partners that have international reach,” he said.

Wei Fan also emphasises the scale of his company’s ambitions in health AI, stressing that it is focused on helping to treat diseases that affect very large numbers of patients.

 

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