As antimicrobial-resistant infections are set to overtake cancer as the top global health risk by 2050, the world needs to quickly find a solution that will help in detecting and reducing its risk of mortality while bringing down the economic cost.   

During the keynote session, "Digital Transformation of Health Care: Intelligent Anti-Microbial System (iAMS)," at HIMSS22 APAC, Dr Der-Yang Cho, professor and superintendent of China Medical University Hospital, emphasised the importance of developing a new generation of antibiotics using emerging technologies. 

"Antimicrobial stewardship and development of a next-generation of antibiotics are very important and very critical," he said, noting that AMRs claim 4.7 million lives in Asia each year.

He noted from his presentation that drug-resistant infections lead to more extended hospital stays and potentially greater complications with mortality rising by 7.6% for every hour of delay in administering treatment. Unfortunately, he said, 30%-50% of existing antibiotics are inappropriately prescribed.

Moreover, there have been no new registered classes of antibiotics for human treatment for over four decades, Dr Cho mentioned.

In this regard, CMUH developed the Intelligent Anti-Microbial System (iAMS) which integrates four platforms into one. Two platforms on the information side are a clinical decision support system and personalised antibiograms, which shows the antimicrobial susceptibility profile of a targeted microorganism. On the AI-powered risk prediction side is the MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry which predicts both antimicrobial susceptibility of a bacteria and risks of sepsis and mortality. 

"We put them together into one platform for automating the antimicrobial treatment," explained Dr Cho. 

The AI technology has a current accuracy of over 80% and has brought down reporting time from 72 hours to an hour.