With the improvement of economic conditions and the increase in living standards, people’s attention in regard to health is also continuously increasing. They are beginning to place their hopes on machines, expecting artificial intelligence (AI) to provide a more humanized medical environment and personalized services, thus greatly expanding the supply and bridging the gap between resource supply and demand. With the development of IoT technology, the arrival of the 5G and 6G communication era, and the enhancement of computing capabilities in particular, the development and application of AI-assisted healthcare have been further promoted. Currently, research on and the application of artificial intelligence in the field of medical assistance are continuously deepening and expanding. AI holds immense economic value and has many potential applications in regard to medical institutions, patients, and healthcare professionals. It has the ability to enhance medical efficiency, reduce healthcare costs, improve the quality of healthcare services, and provide a more intelligent and humanized service experience for healthcare professionals and patients. This study elaborates on AI development history and development timelines in the medical field, types of AI technologies in healthcare informatics, the application of AI in the medical field, and opportunities and challenges of AI in the field of medicine. The combination of healthcare and artificial intelligence has a profound impact on human life, improving human health levels and quality of life and changing human lifestyles.

Lung cancer has the highest mortality rate among all malignancies. Non-micro pulmonary nodules are the primary manifestation of early-stage lung cancer. If patients can be detected with nodules in the early stage and receive timely treatment, their survival rate can be improved. Due to the large number of patients and limited medical resources, doctors take a longer time to make a diagnosis, which reduces efficiency and accuracy. Besides, there are no suitable approaches for developing countries. Therefore, we propose a 2.5D-based cascaded multi-stage framework for automatic detection and segmentation (DS-CMSF) of pulmonary nodules. The first three stages of the framework are used to discover lesions, and the latter stage is used to segment them. The first locating stage introduces the classical 2D-based Yolov5 model to locate the nodules roughly on axial slices. The second aggregation stage proposes a candidate nodule selection (CNS) algorithm to locate further and reduce redundant candidate nodules. The third classification stage uses a multi-size 3D-based fusion model to accommodate nodules of varying sizes and shapes for false-positive reducing. The last segmentation stage introduces multi-scale and attention modules into 3D-based UNet autoencoder to segment the nodular regions finely. Our proposed framework achieves 95.95% sensitivity and 89.50% CPM for nodules detection on the LUNA16 dataset, and 86.75% DSC for nodules segmentation on the LIDC-IDRI dataset. Moreover, our approach also achieves the accuracy-complexity trade-off, which can effectively realize the auxiliary diagnosis of pulmonary nodules in developing countries.

Osteosarcoma is the most common malignant osteosarcoma, and most developing countries face great challenges in the diagnosis due to the lack of medical resources. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has always been an important tool for the detection of osteosarcoma, but it is a time-consuming and labor-intensive task for doctors to manually identify MRI images. It is highly subjective and prone to misdiagnosis. Existing computer-aided diagnosis methods of osteosarcoma MRI images focus only on accuracy, ignoring the lack of computing resources in developing countries. In addition, the large amount of redundant and noisy data generated during imaging should also be considered. To alleviate the inefficiency of osteosarcoma diagnosis faced by developing countries, this paper proposed an artificial intelligence multiprocessing scheme for pre-screening, noise reduction, and segmentation of osteosarcoma MRI images. For pre-screening, we propose the Slide Block Filter to remove useless images. Next, we introduced a fast non-local means algorithm using integral images to denoise noisy images. We then segmented the filtered and denoised MRI images using a U-shaped network (ETUNet) embedded with a transformer layer, which enhances the functionality and robustness of the traditional U-shaped architecture. Finally, we further optimized the segmented tumor boundaries using conditional random fields. This paper conducted experiments on more than 70,000 MRI images of osteosarcoma from three hospitals in China. The experimental results show that our proposed methods have good results and better performance in pre-screening, noise reduction, and segmentation.

Osteosarcoma is a malignant bone tumor commonly found in adolescents or children, with high incidence and poor prognosis. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which is the more common diagnostic method for osteosarcoma, has a very large number of output images with sparse valid data and may not be easily observed due to brightness and contrast problems, which in turn makes manual diagnosis of osteosarcoma MRI images difficult and increases the rate of misdiagnosis. Current image segmentation models for osteosarcoma mostly focus on convolution, whose segmentation performance is limited due to the neglect of global features. In this paper, we propose an intelligent assisted diagnosis system for osteosarcoma, which can reduce the burden of doctors in diagnosing osteosarcoma from three aspects. First, we construct a classification-image enhancement module consisting of resnet18 and DeepUPE to remove redundant images and improve image clarity, which can facilitate doctors' observation. Then, we experimentally compare the performance of serial, parallel, and hybrid fusion transformer and convolution, and propose a Double U-shaped visual transformer with convolution (DUconViT) for automatic segmentation of osteosarcoma to assist doctors' diagnosis. This experiment utilizes more than 80,000 osteosarcoma MRI images from three hospitals in China. The results show that DUconViT can better segment osteosarcoma with DSC 2.6% and 1.8% higher than Unet and Unet++, respectively. Finally, we propose the pixel point quantification method to calculate the area of osteosarcoma, which provides more reference basis for doctors' diagnosis. Code: https://github.com/lingziqiang/DUconViT

Osteosarcoma is a primary malignant tumor. It is difficult to cure and expensive to treat. Generally, diagnosis is made by analyzing MRI images of patients. In the process of clinical diagnosis, the mainstream method is the still time-consuming and laborious manual screening. Modern computer image segmentation technology can realize the automatic processing of the original image of osteosarcoma and assist doctors in diagnosis. However, to achieve a better effect of segmentation, the complexity of the model is relatively high, and the hardware conditions in developing countries are limited, so it is difficult to use it directly. Based on this situation, we propose an osteosarcoma aided segmentation method based on a guided aggregated bilateral network (OSGABN), which improves the segmentation accuracy of the model and greatly reduces the parameter scale, effectively alleviating the above problems. The fast bilateral segmentation network (FaBiNet) is used to segment images. It is a high-precision model with a detail branch that captures low-level information and a lightweight semantic branch that captures high-level semantic context. We used more than 80,000 osteosarcoma MRI images from three hospitals in China for detection, and the results showed that our model can achieve an accuracy of around 0.95 and a params of 2.33 M.

Bone malignant tumors are metastatic and aggressive, with poor treatment outcomes and prognosis. Rapid and accurate diagnosis is crucial for limb salvage and increasing the survival rate. There is a lack of research on deep learning to segment bone malignant tumor lesions in medical images with complex backgrounds and blurred boundaries. Therefore, we propose a new intelligent auxiliary framework for the medical image segmentation of bone malignant tumor lesions, which consists of a supervised edge-attention guidance segmentation network (SEAGNET). We design a boundary key points selection module to supervise the learning of edge attention in the model to retain fine-grained edge feature information. We precisely locate malignant tumors by instance segmentation networks while extracting feature maps of tumor lesions in medical images. The rich contextual-dependent information in the feature map is captured by mixed attention to better understand the uncertainty and ambiguity of the boundary, and edge attention learning is used to guide the segmentation network to focus on the fuzzy boundary of the tumor region. We implement extensive experiments on real-world medical data to validate our model. It validates the superiority of our method over the latest segmentation methods, achieving the best performance in terms of the Dice similarity coefficient (0.967), precision (0.968), and accuracy (0.996). The results prove the important contribution of the framework in assisting doctors to improve the accuracy of diagnosis and clinical efficiency.