The clinical data in the AI age

Hitachi High-Tech Corp. is known as an in vitro diagnostic device manufacturer in the global market. It is known as the clinical chemistry analyzer and the immunoassay analyzer. More than eighty thousands of our devices are running in the clinical laboratory of hospitals and commercial laboratories. These devices are controlled by CPU with many actuators and sensors. Chemical reactions are converted into light strength and electronic signals. Series of analogue signals are converted into digital data. Through calculation, a certain amount of the quantified chemical components in your blood will be reported as number, i.e. concentration. Together with the progress of electronic components, additional features were integrated time by time. More than two hundred chemical components in blood can be measured. For example, glucose is a component which is widely measured for diabetes treatment. In many cases, patients can get the result within 90 minutes after drawing blood by a phlebotomist. These data are used for clinical diagnostics by medical doctors on the day of a patient’s visit. After the improvement of the sensitivity and development of wider menu of assays, medical decision requires standardized results to compare the cases of diseases. Before the global standardization, it was not so easy to transfer medical knowledge with a set of chemical concentrations to the other cases. In each hospital, people define their own knowledge step wise. In the era of artificial intelligence, the highly controlled and standardized results will contribute to the establishment of sophisticated medical judgement and treatment.