China’s largest search engine, Baidu, launched a subsidiary called Baidu Health on March 12, online news portal Sina reported, citing corporate registration information detected by intelligence provider Tianyancha.
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Baidu Health, with a registered capital of 30 million yuan (US$4.3 million), has a business scope of software, cosmetics, sanitizing materials, medical gear, and more.
Baidu declined to comment when contacted by KrAsia on Monday.
Baidu is one of many Chinese tech giants leveraging its capabilities to help the country contain the Covid-19 outbreak. With its telecommunication technologies, Huawei has powered a remote diagnosis platform in a new makeshift hospital in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province. JD.com has used its Level 4 autonomous driving vehicles to deliver medical supplies to a hospital in Wuhan.
After the outbreak, Baidu launched a free medical consultation platform on its app to provide online access to doctors and answers to pneumonia-related questions.
By leveraging Baidu’s open-source deep learning platform PaddlePaddle and Baidu’s semantic segmentation toolkit PaddleSeg, Beijing-based data analysis company LinkingMed developed an AI-powered pneumonia screening and lesion detection system. The system, which has been put into use in a hospital in Hunan province, can pinpoint the disease in less than one minute with a detection accuracy of 92%.
Before establishing this subsidiary, Baidu applied to the authorities to include selling medical instruments into its business scope, and the company sought to donate eye-scanning machines to 500 impoverished counties across China, KrAsia reported in February 2019.
Currency converted from Chinese yuan to US dollar: US$1 = 6.99 yuan.
This report was first published on KrAsia.
Editing by Miguel Cordon
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