A Chinese startup has opened the world’s first clinic in Saudi Arabia where artificial intelligence diagnoses patients, a key step in replacing human doctors as the first line of medical treatment. Synyi AI, a Shanghai-based medical technology company, launched the trial program in Saudi Arabia’s eastern Al-Ahsa region in April in collaboration with the country’s Almoosa Health Group. The pilot will see a virtual AI doctor making diagnoses and prescriptions to patients on its own, through interactions similar to dealing with a human doctor. When patients come to the clinic, they describe their symptoms via a tablet computer to an AI “doctor” named “Dr. Hua”. The AI follows up with more questions and analyzes data and images taken with the help of human assistants, such as cardiograms and X-rays. Once the consultation is over, Dr. Hua provides a treatment plan, which is reviewed and signed off by a traditional human doctor without seeing the patients. The human doctors are also on hand to deal with emergencies that AI can’t handle. The technology had an error rate of less than 0.3% during a testing phase prior to the current trial, according to Synyi AI.
“What AI has done in the past is to assist doctors, but now we are taking the final step of the journey to let AI diagnose and treat the patients directly,” Synyi AI CEO Zhang Shaodian said in an interview.

Full story : Shanghai-based Synyi AI launches a trial program in Saudi Arabia to let patients see an AI doctor for diagnoses and prescriptions, which a human doctor reviews.