MANILA, Philippines – Huawei Philippines says it’s looking to partner with Philippine hospitals in assisting them with COVID-19 diagnoses. 

Huawei is proposing the use of its Huawei Cloud AI-assisted diagnosis for COVID-19, a system that Huawei says uses AI to speed up the process of evaluating computed tomgography (CT) images. The company said that in China, the country’s health commission, includes CT scans as part of its clinical diagnosis standards for COVID-19. Huawei’s AI technology could reportedly speed up the process of analyzing these results with an accuracy of 98%, in the process reducing the workloads of doctors tasked with analyzing the images. 

The technology is said to be able to help doctors distinguish between early, advanced, and severe stages of COVID-19, and more quickly evaluate a patient’s progress and the effects drugs may be having on them. It uses what Huawei calls “computer vision and medical image analysis technologies” to make evaluations of a patient’s lungs. 

To make the evaluation, Huawei is asking partner hospitals to upload the CT scan of patients to Huawei’s cloud service.

“We want to partner with government and private-run hospitals for this project. Partner hospitals will upload the CT Scan of patients to Huawei CLOUD and a 3D rendition of the scan will be received by the medical professional in minutes,” Huawei said in a statement. 

Huawei Philippines vice president Guo Zhi also said they are offering the service for free. Interested hospitals may contact Huawei through inquireph@huawei.com. “We want to make the technology accessible. This is part of our Corporate Social Responsibility Program,” said Guo. 

Huawei’s COVID-detecting technologies come at a time when Chinese companies are experiencing distrust because of a Chinese intelligence law that forces domestic companies to hand over data when asked by the government, as well as espionage accusations levied by the US specifically on Huawei and ZTE. – Rappler.com