How Health Care Data and Lax Rules Help China Prosper in AI

At Wake Radiology in North Carolina, roughly 50 doctors scrutinize x-rays and other images for local medical providers. Within a few weeks, they should start to get help on some lung CT scans from machine-learning algorithms that highlight potentially cancerous tissue nodules. Although Wake is based in a region known as the Research Triangle, for its intensity of high-tech R&D, the lung-reading software hails from elsewhere--China. Infervision, a four-year-old Beijing startup, has amassed more than a million scans from Chinese hospitals that it's using to train and test algorithms. Gathering medical data is much easier for Chinese companies than for their US counterparts, because patient populations are larger and the burden of privacy regulations smaller. "In the US, particularly for big academic hospitals, you have to go through so many processes and it can take a really long time to access data," says Yufeng Deng, Infervision's chief scientist.