A groundbreaking autonomous virtual healthcare platform in China, known as Agent Hospital, is set to go public in 2025. Yang Liu, professor at Tsinghua University's Department of Computer Science and Technology and co-research head of the project, confirmed the timeline to Healthcare IT News.

Developed by the university's Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), this virtual hospital replicates the entire cycle of real-world hospital processes, from disease onset to patient follow-ups. The concept, claimed to be the first of its kind globally, was introduced in May through a paper on Cornell University's arXiv platform.

Innovative AI Technology

Agent Hospital's virtual actors, including patients, doctors, and nurses, are powered by a large language model (LLM). These AI characters will represent real people during a public pilot, scheduled for early 2025 by AIR’s spinoff startup, Tairex.

The project employs a unique design method called MedAgent-Zero, enabling AI doctors to learn and evolve continuously. By interacting with patients, analyzing medical literature, and reviewing both successes and failures, the system improves clinical accuracy. Research results show AI doctors achieving 88% accuracy in exams, 95.6% in diagnoses, and 77.6% in treatments.

AI doctors also demonstrated 93% accuracy when answering questions from the MedQA dataset, which includes content from the United States Medical Licensing Examination.

Expanding Capabilities

Currently, the platform hosts 42 AI doctors across 21 medical departments, including emergency, respiratory, and cardiology. Researchers aim to expand the range of disease coverage and enhance features such as historical patient records and dynamic disease distribution.

Future plans include optimizing the LLM, with the current versions of OpenAI's ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 being utilized. "We will use the latest and most advanced LLM," Prof. Yang noted.

The virtual hospital's rapid advancements promise to redefine global healthcare by offering unparalleled efficiency and precision.