A Robot doctor? No, it’s not only in sci-fi anymore but now exists in China

Beijing, November 27: A robot is helping the doctor’s for treatment of patients- does it sound like a scene from sci-fi? No, rather it’s going to be true in China. For the first time ever, For the First Time, a Robot in China has passed the country’s National Medical Licensing Exam. It even scored much higher than the required pass marks. Xiaoyi, the robot which passed the test is an AI-powered robot and its name means “Little Doctor”.

The robot had to show a quite impressive reasoning power as half of the questions in the test were about case rather than theoretical knowledge. But yes it had to absorb the contents of dozens of medical textbooks, 2 million medical records, and 400,000 articles to develop the kind of reasoning. Though for independent practice it has to cross a long way ahead, it can help doctors to identify problems quickly and avoid some risks.

“We will officially launch the robot in March 2018. It is not meant to replace doctors. Instead, it is to promote better people-machine cooperation so as to boost efficiency,” iFlytek chairman Liu Qingfeng told.

The main vision underlying this mission is to use AI for cancer treatments and training purposes. While China faces a shortage of general practitioners in rural users, use of AI may help a lot to provide health care access to everyone.