Kyoto University and Fujitsu Launch Joint Research Project to Advance Medicine through the Use of AI

Kyoto University, Fujitsu Ltd, and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd have announced that they have established the Department of Medical Intelligent Systems, a joint research project at the Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine to use artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of medicine. The research activities are being conducted as of January 2018 and will run for approximately two years.

The joint research project will use all types of medical information, including patient data accumulated on electronic medical records collected by Kyoto University Hospital and the Fujitsu Group's advanced AI technology, Fujitsu Human Centric AI Zinrai. Through collaboration between Kyoto University's physicians and bioinformatics researchers and the Fujitsu Group's AI engineers, the project will leverage this information and use AI to accelerate R&D toward advanced, next-generation medicine, such as creating new approaches to diagnostic support and drug discovery. Fujitsu and Kyoto University aim to apply the knowledge database platform they've developed through their joint research and the insights it elicits to related fields, such as health insurance, and broadly put them to use for the benefit of society.

To be able to use AI to generate new knowledge and insights, the data will first be preprocessed using AI (natural language processing), and an environment for analysis will be built. Next, with this huge volume of comprehensively sorted data, another form of AI (machine learning) will be used to extract the common characteristics for each disease indication and create models that will contribute to new approaches to diagnostic support, including the identification of specific disease characteristics from medical images, and the discovery of next-generation drugs. In addition, research will be conducted on advancing AI technology specifically within the field of medicine.

The new knowledge and insights discovered, as well as the AI technology for the medical field, will be comprehensively built onto a platform, leading to the future realisation of a knowledge database that can be widely used in the medical field.