In this work, we present VietMed - a Vietnamese speech recognition dataset in the medical domain comprising 16h of labeled medical speech, 1000h of unlabeled medical speech and 1200h of unlabeled general-domain speech. To our best knowledge, VietMed is by far the world's largest public medical speech recognition dataset in 7 aspects: total duration, number of speakers, diseases, recording conditions, speaker roles, unique medical terms and accents. VietMed is also by far the largest public Vietnamese speech dataset in terms of total duration. Additionally, we are the first to present a medical ASR dataset covering all ICD-10 disease groups and all accents within a country. Moreover, we release the first public large-scale pre-trained models for Vietnamese ASR, w2v2-Viet and XLSR-53-Viet, along with the first public large-scale fine-tuned models for medical ASR. Even without any medical data in unsupervised pre-training, our best pre-trained model XLSR-53-Viet generalizes very well to the medical domain by outperforming state-of-the-art XLSR-53, from 51.8% to 29.6% WER on test set (a relative reduction of more than 40%). All code, data and models are made publicly available here.

Tenet Health Central Coast is now using new technology in conjunction with an application that will help health workers diagnose and respond more quickly to patients suffering from a stroke. The application, called Viz.ai, is used by the stroke response team at Tenet Health Central Coast hospitals. The application uses artificial intelligence technology to send an instant chat to the stroke response team, saving five steps during the initial response to a stroke after a patient undergoes a CT scan. Viz.ai uses advanced imaging technology to automatically analyze CT perfusion images of the brain. Those images produce parametric color maps and calculate CT perfusion parameters that then notifies the neurologist of the diagnosis.

What might self-driving cars do for people with a disability in places like the Central Coast? Notwithstanding recent improvements, the Coast still has a relatively poor public transport network, something that hinders people who cannot drive themselves to work or social engagements. And so it was with much anticipation I travelled to the Newcastle foreshore to experience for myself the driverless shuttle imported from France. If the shuttle was to be trialled and accepted here on the Central Coast, I could see it being a huge advantage to people living with disabilities, mobility issues, the elderly and people who are unable to drive. In 2016 approximately 6.4 per cent of people on the Central Coast needed help in their day-to-day lives due to disability.