Can IBM Watson change the Chinese mental illness clinic?

The news of Watson's 21 hospitals in China has not yet dispersed. Just last week, China’s “brain plan” entered the media vision again. The "Science and Technology Daily" and other media have in-depth coverage of China's internal brain research. Corresponding to the brain plans of the United States and the United Kingdom, China’s brain plan is being secretly laid out. According to reports, "brain science and brain-like research" was listed as "Science and Technology Innovation 2030 - Major Project" by the "13th Five-Year Plan", also known as the Chinese "brain plan." At present, Beijing and Shanghai have launched regional plans and started to fund related research projects. What changes will the Chinese brain plan bring to frontline medical care ? Taking very challenging mental illness treatments as an example, the reporter interviewed first-line doctors and researchers and brought forward a forward-looking report on the use of artificial intelligence in the medical field.

We are no stranger to mental illness

In March 2016, a physician in Huaibei City, Anhui Province was attacked and killed by a patient with a history of mental illness in his sleep. In May of the same year, Chen Zhongwei, the chief physician of the Department of Stomatology of Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital, died under the knife of a mental patient.

According to the “Investigation on the Situation of Violence and Injury in Hospital Places” published in 2013, nearly 40% of the perpetrators who caused obvious damage to the medical staff's body were introverted, isolated, paranoid, and nearly 30% had a history of mental illness.

Today, with the simultaneous increase in the incidence of mental illness and the need for diagnosis and treatment, the transformation of clinical diagnosis and treatment technology is imminent. However, the development of psychiatry has been initially and slowly relative to the entire medical field. From the formulation of diagnostic criteria to the specific clinical diagnosis, there are too many subjective factors and lack of effective quantitative basis.

Solving this pain point has also become a difficult problem in the research and industry that is urgently needed to be overcome.

Huge group of mental disorders

According to the National Health and Family Planning Commission, as early as the end of 2014, the number of registered serious mentally ill patients has reached 4.297 million. But this is far from reflecting China's huge population of mental illness patients. In 2009, The Lancet published an epidemiological survey of mental disorders in four provinces in China, with an adult prevalence rate of 17.5% - based on the inference, about 173 million people in China have different types. Mental disorders, of which 158 million people have never received professional treatment for mental health. The survey is by far the largest survey conducted by the industry on the state of mental disorders in China, containing 63,004 adult samples; covering 113 million adults in Shandong, Zhejiang, Qinghai and Gansu provinces; Psychiatrists and nurses conduct investigations as investigators. Most of these mental illnesses are related to anxiety, mood, drug abuse and mental disorders.

Under the tense rhythm of life, mental illness has become an irresistible burden of contemporary society.