Ping An's Lung Nodule Smart Reading Technology is Evaluated by LUNA as No. 1 in the World

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Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd.

Jan 05, 2018, 05:31 ET

HONG KONG and SHANGHAI, Jan. 5, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Lung Nodule Analysis ("LUNA"), an internationally acclaimed assessment on the medical imaging field, released its evaluation results recently. It showed that the smart reading technology developed by Ping An Technology, a subsidiary of Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. (hereafter "Ping An" or "the Group", HKEx: 2318; SSE: 601318)'s has achieved major breakthroughs. It has refreshed the world records of "nodule detection" and "false positive reduction" with the respective accuracy of 95.1% and 96.8%, which both are ranked first in the world. This is the first time that Ping An Technology has won a world record in the medical imaging field and it is also a monumental achievement of the Group in the AI field.

Ping An won a world record of “nodule detection”

Ping An won a world record of “false positive reduction”

LUNA official website screenshots:

The LUNA (Lung Nodule Analysis) evaluation is an international authoritative assessment on lung nodule detection. Since 2016, domestic and foreign professionals from academia and industry, including Chinese University of Hong Kong, Peking University, Alibaba and iFLYTEK have been actively participate in this evaluation. It has one of the most representative and most focused evaluation tasks in the medical imaging field. It is known that it uses data that is mainly from a number of medical institutions in the United States and jointly marked and completed by a number of medical experts.

As we know, Lung cancer is one of the cancers with the highest mortality in the world. At the present, the most suitable method, promoted by experts in the United States, is to have low-dose CT scan for the high-risk individuals for lung cancer. However, in the general screening process, doctors need to analyze millions of CT images, which causes a great burden for the treatment process. Therefore, the need for the development of smart lung cancer detection algorithm to optimize screening process becomes very urgent.

In response to this challenge, the medical imaging team of Ping An Technology, with its comprehensive knowledge in medical diagnosis field, creatively put forward the solution of integrating the theory of Robust Control with the advanced artificial intelligence algorithms such as deep learning and transfer learning. The result is a sound breakthrough in the area of lung nodule detection, location and identification. At the present, the technology is gradually being applied in actual computer-aided medical diagnosis scenarios in a number of top AAA hospitals.

It is reported that Ping An Technology's artificial intelligence technology can also be used in gastric cancer detection, liver cancer recognition, bone age prediction, diabetic retinopathy screening and imaging-aided diagnosis for other diseases. In addition, in the medical treatment field, Ping An Technology also forms a high-precision OCR recognition algorithm through mass data training to complete the entry of transcribing text in images into digital data with the assistance of crowdsourcing operation for manual audit of the OCR results. This results in advancing the digital management of medical files. At the same time, smart medical procedures such as "face recognition for medical treatment" and "face recognition for payment" have greatly facilitated patient visits and enhanced the services and efficiencies of the public health care system.

In the AI prediction area, Ping An Technology, together with Chongqing CDC, has created the first disease prediction and screening model with "Artificial Intelligence + Big Data" in China to predict the occurrences of infectious diseases one week in advance and to help governments enhance efficiency, strengthen disease prevention and control costs in the prevention and control of related diseases.

Over the past 10 years, Ping An has invested more than RMB 50 billion in the research, development and application of innovative technologies and made major breakthroughs in the five core technologies (biometrics, big data, artificial intelligence, blockchain and cloud platform). At the present, its biometric technology is leading the world with the accuracy of 99.8% in face recognition, which has been used in 200+ scenarios and 800 million person-times. The accuracy in voiceprint recognition is over 99%, with a database of 50+ million voiceprints. The speed in micro-facial expression recognition is 1 second within 54 different complex micro-expressions.

Ping An believes that the new LUNA record set by this smart reading technology indicates that some of the technological innovations in AI technology created by Ping An Technology have shown their leads in the international scientific field. The Company will continue to push forward its two-pronged strategy of "Finance + Technology". Through technology-driven innovations in the financial and healthcare industries, it will continue to cultivate and enhance the application of artificial intelligence technologies in multiple scenes and to implement technological achievements in its traditional financial services. While this strategy is enhancing its competitiveness, Ping An will also build an ecosystem and a platform to continually create innovative technologies to be the world's leading fintech company.

For more information contact:

Vicky Cheng
+86-186-1706-3169
[email protected]

SOURCE Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd.