Alibaba open-sources medical AI model that can detect cancer and nearly 150 conditions

Alibaba Group Holding’s research arm, Damo Academy, has open-sourced an artificial intelligence model capable of identifying nearly 150 abdominal conditions – including cancers – by reading computed tomography (CT) scans, marking the latest step in the firm’s growing medical AI efforts.

The vision-language model, called Damo Radar, was designed to analyse contrast-enhanced CT scans covering 18 abdominal organs and identify a broad range of diseases and other abnormalities, such as malignant tumours, the institute said on Friday.

The model was trained using CT scans paired with clinical reports. In nearly 40,000 real-world examinations, it achieved an average area under the curve (AUC) of 0.913 across 146 clinical findings. An AUC of 1.0 represents perfect diagnostic accuracy.

The research team said the training method could eventually be extended to other types of medical imaging, calling the model “the world’s first expert-level generalist medical imaging model”.