The 2024 Taiwan Healthcare Expo, held from December 5 to 8 at the Nangang Exhibition Center, featured Taichung Veterans General Hospital’s (TVGH) theme of “Integrating Healthcare and Technology, Moving Taiwan Toward the Global Stage.” The hospital showcased advancements in smart healthcare, cutting-edge medicine, precision medicine, regenerative medicine, and telemedicine. Highlights included applications of AI-powered speech recognition for medical consultation lines in collaboration with NVIDIA, large language model-assisted electronic medical record writing, and innovations in breast cancer treatment using digital twins and AI technology in partnership with Foxconn. Other notable demonstrations included AI kidney ultrasound diagnostics, a mobile app for occupational musculoskeletal injury detection, and advanced catheter technologies for high-risk coronary artery diseases, as well as 3D pulsed ablation treatments for arrhythmias.
TVGH is the only hospital in Taiwan to be ranked among the Newsweek Global Top 100 Smart Hospitals. The hospital has implemented the H200 supercomputer to accelerate the development of AI applications, significantly upgrading healthcare operations and marking a major milestone toward achieving smart healthcare goals. For example, considering the needs of patients and their families for medical or home care, TVGH’s 24-hour medical consultation hotline handles approximately 2,000 calls per month. Nurses manually input key points into the system, and later write nursing records from memory, a process that is time-consuming and incomplete. To address this, TVGH partnered with NVIDIA to develop an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. Using techniques like “automatic speaker segmentation,” “speech sequence reconstruction,” and “medical terminology,” the ASR system, powered by large language models (LLMs), instantly transcribes voice into text and refines it into a “telephone consultation summary.” The system accurately distinguishes between the voices of the nurse and the patient, achieving a higher character recognition accuracy than commercial standards, and reducing the time needed to edit each nursing record by 3 to 5 minutes, thus enhancing the quality of medical consultation services.
TVGH’s Nursing Department Deputy Director, Shu-Fang Liu, explained that the system could be further applied to clinical areas like nursing records and shift changes, reducing the administrative workload and allowing nurses to focus on clinical care, ultimately improving healthcare quality.
Additionally, TVGH leveraged NVIDIA’s inference microservice (NIM) technology to create large language models that assist with electronic medical record writing. This AI-powered system streamlines the process of compiling medical summaries and analyzing patient data, automatically generating initial drafts for healthcare professionals to reference, thus reducing the burden of medical recordkeeping. The system is currently being trialed by clinical physicians and will later be integrated into official information systems.
In partnership with Foxconn Technology, TVGH, using the high-performance computational platform provided by NVIDIA, co-developed a breast cancer digital twin model. By combining clinical data and imaging with AI analysis of multi-modal, multi-parameter data, the system creates 3D virtual breast models to estimate the personalized treatment effects, prognosis, and potential side effects of breast cancer therapy. Looking ahead, the partners plan to refine the algorithm and expand it to other treatment areas, promoting the broader application of smart healthcare and creating a new paradigm for integrating patient welfare and technological innovation.
In addition to supporting healthcare work environments, TVGH also offers a “Musculoskeletal Occupational Injury Detection App.” This innovative system, utilizing AI and the KIM (Key Indicator Method) scale for risk assessments, is the first in the world to apply AI to assess the cumulative risk of musculoskeletal injuries. Visitors to the expo could directly experience the app, which analyzes posture and assesses risks by demonstrating repetitive motions performed in daily or work activities. The app uses 3D imaging to display skeletal load conditions, helping healthcare professionals improve patient intervention strategies and achieving new breakthroughs in smart healthcare.
Through these innovative applications, TVGH is not only driving the forward-looking development of medical technologies but also deepening the collaboration between the healthcare and technology industries, bringing new opportunities to global healthcare.
Resource: 中榮獲全球百大最佳智慧醫院！醫療科技展展示AI智慧醫療新亮點
