Three days after Qiu Sijun, a retired bricklayer in eastern China, went for a routine diabetes checkup, he received a call from a doctor he hadn’t met before. The doctor, the head of the hospital’s pancreatic department, wanted him to come in for a follow-up. “I knew it couldn’t be anything good,” Mr. Qiu, 57, recalled.
He was partly right. The bad news was that Mr. Qiu had pancreatic cancer. But there was good news, too: The tumor had been detected early. The doctor, Zhu Kelei, was able to remove it. This was possible only because of a new artificial-intelligence-powered tool that the hospital was testing, which had flagged Mr. Qiu’s routine CT scan before he had any symptoms. The tool is one example of how Chinese tech companies and hospitals are racing to apply A.I. to some of medicine’s most stubborn problems.

Full report : A Chinese hospital says Alibaba’s PANDA AI tool has analyzed 180,000 CT scans and detected ~24 pancreatic cancer cases since its deployment in November 2024.