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Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. is pleased to announce that Ping An AskBob Doctor’s smart imaging model for diagnosing pelvic and hip injuries is the first of its kind to accurately detect all kinds of trauma-related findings simultaneously in X-ray images. In a research paper published in the international journal Nature Communications, the model is shown to overcome the limitation of other artificial intelligence (AI) systems, which can only detect individual fractures.

The model, a deep learning algorithm, can help physicians make faster, more accurate diagnoses and save lives. Hip fractures mainly occur in elderly people and patients with major trauma. Although they are not directly fatal, complications can lead to a high mortality rate. Reducing the rate of missed diagnoses, improving the comprehensiveness of the detection, and providing accurate diagnoses is critical.

Ping An Health Technology Research Institute, Ping An Smart City, Ping An Good Doctor and the Department of Trauma and Emergency Surgery of Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taiwan jointly released the research paper “A scalable physician-level deep learning algorithm detects universal trauma on pelvic radiographs”. The research team gathered the pelvic X-ray data of 1,888 emergency room patients to evaluate the model’s performance in obtain the fracture results and locations. It achieved an overall accuracy of 92.4%. Compared with general clinical diagnoses, the model substantially improves detection accuracy, speeds up the treatment progress, improves the treatment effectiveness on high-risk patients, and reduces the economic cost to patients through earlier detection and treatment.

This is the first AI algorithm to detect all fracture types captured on the X-ray images, including, but not limited to, hip fractures, pelvic fractures, femoral fractures, hip dislocation and artificial joint peripheral fractures.

As of March, 2021, the AskBob Doctor AI pelvic trauma detection technology has been used in the real-life clinical environment in Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taiwan for nearly eight months. The results have shown that the misdiagnosis rate has significantly reduced. Since adopting the AI system, the misdiagnosis rate has dropped from 9.7% to 0.7% among emergency physicians, 11.3% to 1.58% among resident physicians and 6% to 0.5% among specialist physicians. The model has performed comparably to radiologists and certain orthopaedic specialists in terms of quantitative indicators such as sensitivity and specificity.

The smart imaging model for the diagnosis of pelvis and hip injuries is Ping An’s latest achievement in smart imaging technology. Ping An’s smart imaging technology covers nine major systems of human body — the motor, digestive, respiratory, urinary, reproductive, endocrine, immune, nervous and cardiovascular systems. It supports various equipment including computed tomography (CT,) X-ray, ultrasound and fundus optical coherence tomography (OCT).

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