(Yicai) June 30 -- Shanghai Xinhua Hospital has allied with the healthcare platform of Chinese artificial intelligence startup SenseTime Group to release a virtual AI pediatrician.

The AI doctor, developed based on SenseTime's medical large language model and launched on June 28, can provide advice on diagnosing children and enhance the medical capabilities of pediatricians in grassroots hospitals, according to Xinhua Hospital.

The AI pediatrician is a strictly tested and validated intelligent system, Sun Kun, president of Xinhua Hospital, told Yicai. It performed excellently in internal evaluations and third-party professional assessments, showing remarkable professionalism in medical knowledge, Sun pointed out.

"The AI general practitioner can serve as a virtual family pediatrician," Sun noted. "When parents ask questions or upload images, it can provide diagnostic suggestions."

China's grassroots medical resources face significant shortages, with substantial room for improving the competence of pediatricians, Sun said, adding that the AI doctor can help pediatricians in grassroots medical institutions enhance their diagnostic and treatment capabilities.

The AI pediatrician does not aim to replace doctors but to provide powerful auxiliary tools and knowledge support in resource-constrained areas, Sun stressed.

General AI models have obvious limitations in medical applications, including insufficient professional knowledge and severe "hallucination" issues, Sun noted. In contrast, the AI pediatrician is a dedicated medical LLM that has undergone compliance verification and possesses clinical reasoning capabilities, Sun said.

Besides being trained on massive data, the AI pediatrician has undergone special medical task training to achieve deep simulation of clinical thinking, improving the accuracy of its complex clinical reasoning, said a representative from SenseCare Smart Health Platform.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Martin Kadiev