A 49-year-old male patient came to Bach Mai Hospital with a history of hypertension, myocardial infarction, and had 3 stents placed. The patient happened to go for a health check-up. Initial results of the chest X-ray showed that the patient had a opaque mass in the lung. When doing other paraclinical tests such as bronchoscopy, there was nothing remarkable.
For inexperienced people, it is easy to miss injuries or if doctors do not read carefully, they can easily miss injuries and conclude that it is normal, so the patient misses the opportunity for early diagnosis.
But with the application of artificial intelligence, computers and artificial intelligence automatically read and identified the lesion in the right lung lobe. With this lesion, with structural analysis, artificial intelligence identified this as a nodule with a high risk of malignancy and cancer rate.
"That is the reason we decided to have the patient have a chest CT scan. After the CT scan results are available, the results are pushed to the artificial intelligence server developed by the research team's software. The machine automatically reads and identifies the lesion analyzed for location, structure and nature of the lesion as a high-risk opaque lesion of lung cancer" - Associate Professor, Dr. Vu Van Giap - Deputy Director of Bach Mai Hospital shared.
With this second assessment, the Hospital's Consultation Council decided that even though the patient had such an underlying disease, a bronchoscopy was still needed for further in-depth examination.
Normally, a patient with such an underlying disease and with very small and faint lung lesions may be sent home for further observation for 6 months. And after 6 months, who knows if the tumor has grown invasively and metastasized, the patient has lost the opportunity for early radical treatment.
However, at Bach Mai Hospital, with the results of clinical imaging tests and the judgments suggested by artificial intelligence along with experience in many clinical cases, the hospital's professional council decided to allow the patient to have surgery to remove the entire lung tumor, and perform histopathology.
The patient was skipped lung biopsy which is an invasive biopsy that can cause bleeding, pneumothorax... The research team also used an automated diagnostic toolkit with the support of artificial intelligence for histopathology to read the results.
The results were exactly as expected: The patient had adenocarcinoma. This is a testament to the success of artificial intelligence in supporting early cancer diagnosis. With the diagnosis of the patient having cancer at stage T1M0N0, meaning early stage, surgery will be completely radical, no chemotherapy, no radiation therapy. This is a huge success in the early diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer.
Application of Al in treatment of patients
This case was announced at the 2024 Line Management Review Conference to summarize the line management activities in 2024 and orient the line management plan for 2025, held at Bach Mai Hospital on December 6.
Associate Professor, Dr. Dao Xuan Co - Director of Bach Mai Hospital said: In addition to the main areas of the hospital such as: Emergency resuscitation, Cardiovascular, Neurology, Respiratory, Stroke, Musculoskeletal... which are still focused on investment and development, in the period of 2025 - 2030, the hospital has selected 6 pillars for professional development of the hospital, including:
Effectively implementing the multi-organ transplant project at the Hospital; Applying artificial intelligence in diagnosis, treatment and patient management; Applying gene therapy techniques in disease treatment; Applying stem cell technology in disease treatment; Applying robotic surgery; Applying 3D printing technology in manufacturing medical products and equipment to serve patients.
In the above 6 pillars, the application of artificial intelligence in diagnosis, treatment and patient management of Bach Mai Hospital has initially achieved outstanding results, bringing great benefits to patients.
"We have built 3 diagnostic modules. Up to now, we are the only research group in the world that has a set of 3 interconnections from diagnostic imaging to bronchoscopy and histopathology..." - Associate Professor Vu Van Giap proudly shared.
