Alibaba Cloud doubles down on healthcare for its AI business

Photo credit: daizuoxin / 123RF.

Alibaba’s cloud computing unit, Alibaba Cloud, has made aggressive overseas expansion one of its top priorities over the past year. At home, however, it’s turning its attention towards China’s traditional industries.

In particular, Alibaba Cloud is targeting China’s healthcare sector.

“Today, we actually have a lot of very experienced [healthcare] professionals,” Min Wanli, data mining scientist at Alibaba Cloud, told media at Alibaba Cloud’s computing conference in Shenzhen yesterday. But it’s difficult for them to pass on their knowledge, he said.

“In one day, they have to see so many patients. They already have so little time and to teach young doctors, transfer their experience on top of that – what happens when they retire?” he said. “This precious knowledge can’t be passed on.”

Some doctors in China see as many as 70 patients every day.

It’s a pain point that Alibaba is hoping to capitalize on with its new suite of healthcare solutions – think IBM Watson Health – which will include AI applications in drug discovery, medical imaging diagnoses, and hospital management. Applications like these could help doctors make diagnoses more quickly, lessening the burden of their daily caseload. Some doctors in China see as many as 70 patients every day.

The cloud computing unit already has a few partners, such as Beijing Genomics Institute, who is using Alibaba Cloud’s deep learning technology for identifying adenocarcinoma, a form of lung cancer.

It’s also working with a hospital in Zhejiang province – where Alibaba is headquartered – to automatically identify thyroid cancer. According to Alibaba Cloud, about 20,000 images were used to train its system, which was 85 percent accurate in trial tests. Trained doctors had an accuracy of 60 to 70 percent.

Alibaba Cloud presents its tumor detection system at the company’s cloud computing conference in Shenzhen. Photo credit: Alibaba Cloud.

Alibaba Cloud is a key backbone of Alibaba’s ecommerce empire, which relies on its cloud computing unit to process as much as 175,000 transactions per second.

It’s also an increasingly lucrative arm of the Chinese tech giant. Last December, Alibaba Cloud recorded a revenue increase of 115 percent year-over-year to US$256 million, its seventh consecutive quarter of triple-digit year-over-year growth. And according to a 2016 report from Deutsche Bank, at the end of 2015, Alibaba Cloud had an estimated 65 percent market share in China’s cloud service market, though it ranks fifth worldwide.

Getting the data

Healthcare is just one of several traditional industries that the cloud computing unit is eyeing in its home market. Smart manufacturing, such as using AI to predict and prevent large-scale mechanical failures, is another area of interest, as is working with government officials to reduce traffic and make cities more sustainable. In Hangzhou, Alibaba Cloud says it has helped city officials increase the speed of traffic by 11 percent by making real-time traffic recommendations, such as changing traffic lights.