From the perspective of international pathological AI trends, mainstream countries are actively promoting the development of pathological AI and related data. In 2017, the NHS proposed the establishment of 29 pathological hubs and spokes networks to provide pathological services throughout the UK medical system. In 2019, the Department of Commerce of the UK proposed to establish five digital pathology and imaging centers to speed up the development and progress of pathology in AI, and Philips, GE, Siemens and Leica will jointly lead the five new AI digital pathology imaging centers. At present, China’s domestic AI pathology industry is mainly composed of upstream hardware equipment and reagent manufacturers, midstream pathologists and smart algorithm software development enterprises, and downstream hospitals, CDCs and independent laboratories and other application terminals.
Due to the late start of market development and restrictions of the medical system, the development of China’s pathology industry is relatively slow. Most pathology studies are still confined to hospitals, and pathologists are extremely lacking. Short of registered pathologists, currently, there are only 18,000 registered pathologists in China, but China needs at least 100,000 more pathologists (It usually takes more than 10 years to train a qualified pathologist). Pathologists in the tertiary (3A) hospitals are overloaded with work, while primary hospitals in remote areas are severely lack of pathologists, pathological diagnosis is not timely (It takes an average of 3 weeks in China to issue results).
Therefore, the fusion of artificial intelligence and pathological diagnosis is an inevitable trend of development:
I. Alleviating the shortage of doctors
II. Shortening inspection time
III. Addressing specialization
Asian Institute of Advanced Medicine is working on an AI pathological diagnosis system, which can provide full-process automatic service of AI pathological diagnosis for large and medium-sized hospitals in China, and online to provide remote AI pathological diagnosis services for small and medium-sized hospitals, other cooperative manufacturers, pathological diagnosis center, etc.