A Chinese medical robot named Xiaoyi achieved a passing score of 456 on China’s medical licensing exam in early November. A passing score is 360 out of 600. But 456 is an impressive result considering the robot scored 100 in its first practice run.

Xiaoyi (which means “little doctor”) is a collaboration between

Chinese IT company iFlyTek and Tsinghua University in Beijing collaborated on the development of Xiaoyi, which means “little doctor.” It was developed to test if artificial intelligence (AI) can be effective in identifying links between words, sentences, paragraphs and other natural language features to develop a capacity to reason.

Its much improved score is certainly a demonstration that Xiaoyi has the capacity not only to reason, but to learn and make judgments by itself. After its first pitiful attempt, Xiaoyi was trained by processing dozens of medical textbooks, 2 million medical records and 400,000 articles. While that was effective enough for it to breeze through the questions that involved memorization and information recall, it didn’t do as well when it came to answering questions about patient cases.

An American version of Xiaoyi won’t be replacing any physicians, but the technology could prove useful in correlating symptoms quicker and making clinically useful suggestions. Not sure how this will go over – my doctors hate to hear me ask questions from something I learned on the Internet or even about medication I ask about from TV. VTN