Baidu develops system for making medical diagnoses

Baidu has started the AskADoctor project in China. This is a system that recognizes spoken symptoms of diseases, suggests what that disease may be and to what extent symptoms match, and puts the user in touch with a doctor nearby.

Wei Fan, a researcher for Baidu, tells in an interview with Re/code that Baidu uses deep learning to teach its computers to understand Chinese. Since February, about 40 researchers have been setting up neural networks to understand and speak Mandarin, a complicated language. AskADoctor combines this deep learning model with another model Baidu has created for mapping disease and health data. Subsequently, Baidu hopes to be able to link the system to existing electronic patient records.

A desktop version of AskADoctor is now available and the app should follow shortly. The system can now recognize 520 different diseases. Those 520 diseases would represent 90 percent of the most common diseases. The project has an extra good chance of success in China because the country is actively trying to ban technology companies from abroad. Baidu is therefore one of the few to set up such a project in China. It is not Baidu’s first project in which online and offline services are linked. Last year, for example, Baidu invested in taxi app Uber.