AI-based chatbot will provide advice to neurosurgeons in China

Chinese developers have decided to apply artificial intelligence in the work of neurosurgeons, assisting them in formulating the correct treatment tactics for patients or providing more accurate diagnoses.

Starting this year, a medical chatbot, CARES Copilot 1.0, developed by Hong Kong specialists using the large language model Llama 2.0 from the American company Meta Platforms, will be tested in seven medical centers in the Chinese capital.

According to the developers, approximately 100 computing accelerators were used as the hardware base for the chatbot, with this quantity being roughly evenly divided between Nvidia A100 and the Chinese Huawei Ascend 910B, which are considered close competitors. Chinese companies and institutions face challenges in obtaining accelerators of the Nvidia A100 level due to US sanctions, hence they resort to using Huawei's developments as an alternative.

For the training of the specialized medical large language model, about a million medical records and scientific papers in the field of neurosurgery were utilized. The creators intend that the neural network will not only help in making more accurate diagnoses but also in processing data from diagnostic examinations, including primary information from MRI, ultrasound, and CT scans.

Images, audio recordings, and text will also be well-handled by this system, which, at a certain stage of development, will even be able to provide recommendations to doctors regarding the selection of the correct treatment tactics for a patient.

Chinese specialists have expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of access to advanced Nvidia accelerators but are banking on the use of more accurate data for training the language model, which is expected to yield good results even with a relatively weak hardware base.