Kyoto University in Japan has partnered with information technology firm Fujitsu to establish a joint research project to use artificial intelligence (AI) within medicine.
Established at the Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine, the Department of Medical Intelligent Systems project will run until March 2020.
As part of the project, Kyoto University Hospital’s medical information will be used along with Fujitsu’s advanced AI technology called Fujitsu Human Centric AI Zinrai to accelerate research and development (R&D) for advanced, next-generation medicine.
The university’s physicians and bioinformatics researchers will work together with Fujitsu’s AI engineers to leverage the database platform for analysis of large medical data to discover new diagnostic methods and treatments.
Medical information to be used during the project includes data collected from the University Hospital’s electronic medical records, data from cancer patients recorded in the Kyoto University Cancer Treatment Support Database System, and cohort data.
This data will be initially preprocessed with natural language processing and then an environment for analysis will be created.
Machine learning will be subsequently used to extract the common characteristics for diseases and create models that will support new diagnostic approaches such as the identification of specific disease characteristics from medical images, and discovery of next-generation drugs.
The organisations plan to utilise the findings of the project and the AI platform for future advances in medicine. Fujitsu expects that additional research on the platform could enable use in other fields such as manufacturing and finance.
