Image recognition and understanding

AI-based diagnostic support in medicine with »Pneumo.AI«

Advantages

Creativity & Innovation
Energy efficiency
Expense & Revenue Optimization
Knowledge & Complexity reduction
Material efficiency
Precision & Quality
Process optimization
Real-time results 24/7
Time efficiency / Agiltiy
Workload relief / Comfort

Functional areas

Process optimization

To the demonstrator

→ Go to the interactive AI game »Pneumo.AI«

To overview

AI-based diagnostic support in medicine with »Pneumo.AI«

»Pneumo.AI« is an AI-supported diagnostic software which supports medical professionals in the accurate identification of pneumonia using intelligent image recognition.

In which areas does the AI application offer the greatest benefit?

The »Pneumo.AI« demonstrator was developed to playfully illustrate the ways AI technologies and medical professionals can work together. The disease pneumonia, better known as lung inflammation, keeps specialized medical specialists busy in many hospitals. Until now, possible diseases had to be identified manually using X-ray images, among other things, to initiate appropriate treatment in good time. Today, image recognition systems can help with diagnosis. This not only saves time but can also prevent misjudgments.

What is pneumonia?

Pneumonia is an acute inflammation of the lower respiratory tract, commonly referred to as lung inflammation. Contrary to current belief, pneumonia is still a serious disease in many regions of the world today. In developing countries in particular, pneumonia is one of the most common causes of illness and death in children under the age of five.

How can AI help with diagnosis?

Artificial intelligence systems can support doctors in making a diagnosis. In this case, computer vision, i.e., machine vision, helps to recognize disease characteristics on chest scans.

What is the future of AI in medicine?

Both doctors and data scientists alike see great potential for AI in medicine. Many hospitals have large amounts of data available which could be used to improve diagnostic support. However, it is important that AI systems are only ever understood as assistance tools and that medical staff always remain in charge of decision-making. Also, medical data is highly sensitive and requires special protection.

What are »Pneumo.AI’s« quality characteristics?

Low effort: Since the annotation of medical image datasets usually involves a great deal of effort, it is important to develop data-efficient algorithms to achieve the lowest possible annotation effort.
Immediate analysis: The use of AI technologies allows for immediate evaluation of the scan/X-ray image after it has been taken – with no human interaction. This shows the potential to optimize work processes in clinics, for instance by developing a prioritization system. However, it is important that AI always serves as an assistance system for doctors and never makes decisions on its own.
Secure data processing: For sensitive data such as patient data, it is essential that the AI processes used are secure. All data must be stored on German servers or may only be processed locally by medical specialists or in hospitals.
Powerful AI: In the future, AI-based multimodal analysis will also play an important role in the evaluation of medical image data, as doctors will have a wide range of information available to them during the diagnostic process regarding the patient’s health status or the course of the disease.

»Close collaboration between medical experts and data scientists is the most important basis for the use of artificial intelligence in medicine.«

Helen Schneider

Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS

Which AI technology is used in the KI.NRW demonstrator?

Deep Learning

The Pneumo.AI demonstrator is based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are particularly well suited for processing large image data sets. This technology can also be transferred to other diseases and use cases.

Informed Machine Learning

In this type of machine learning, available prior knowledge and expert knowledge are integrated into the model to develop more data-efficient algorithms, for instance. For Pneumo.AI, the elements of bilateral symmetry of the lung field were considered within the modeling.

Computer Vision

To ensure a good generalization capability of the trained network, various augmentation techniques are implemented. By rotating and zooming the training image data, the network achieves better performance and overfitting is avoided.

What does the AI demonstrator show?

The »Pneumo.AI« demonstrator shows how AI technologies can support doctors in practices and clinics in their everyday work in the future. It is important to emphasize that artificial intelligence is available to medical professionals as an assistance tool, but that the final decision remains with the human being. The demonstrator also illustrates the great potential of AI in medical image processing.

Request a non-binding consultation with our experts now!

Curious? Click here to go straight to the demonstrator!

Try it out now!

Where can I find more information?

AI.Map featuring entries from the medical field

More AI providers, applications, and AI products »made in NRW« with the same AI focus can be found using the filter and search function of the AI.Map, which currently contains more than 1000 entries.

Go to the AI.Map

Lecture on Pneumo.AI at the MEDICA 2022 trade fair

At the international medical trade fair MEDICA 2022, KI.NRW and Fraunhofer IAIS gave a presentation on »Artificial intelligence in healthcare using the example of Pneumo.AI«.

Go to the lecture

SmartHospital: The use of AI in the hospital of the future

The KI.NRW flagship project SmartHospital.NRW aims at developing tools to support hospitals in their digital transformation and in the use of AI. Determine your hospital’s AI maturity level now.

Go to the AI Readiness Check

Contact the team of developers

Helen Schneider

Data Scientist – Computer Vision

Fraunhofer IAIS
Schloss Birlinghoven
53757 Sankt Augustin

Phone +49 2241 14-2735

Send email

Dr. Rafet Sifa

Head of Cognitive Business Optimization

Fraunhofer IAIS
Schloss Birlinghoven
53757 Sankt Augustin

Phone +49 2241 14-2405

Send email

Data analysis and forecasting

“Sustain.AI” – The AI tool for analyzing sustainability reports

Advantages

Creativity & Innovation
Energy efficiency
Expense & Revenue Optimization
Knowledge & Complexity reduction
Materials efficiency
Precision & Quality
Real-time results 24/7
Time efficiency & Agility

Functional areas

Assistance / Support / Staff positions
Finances / Law

To the demonstrator

→ Sustain.AI

To overview

“Sustain.AI” – The AI tool for analyzing sustainability reports

Where does the AI application offer the greatest benefit?

Sustainability reports are an important part of a company’s information policy. They provide interested members of the public with information about the organization’s activities and performance regarding sustainable development. Since 2017, all listed companies with 500 or more employees have been required to publish such reports. In doing so, they follow the CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) directive. The main aim of this directive is to increase transparency regarding the environmental and social aspects of companies in the EU. This includes information on environmental, social and employee issues as well as the protection of human rights and the fight against corruption.

Like annual reports, sustainability reports are also used as a basis for important purchasing or investment decisions. However, the necessary identification of all relevant criteria and information usually requires a great deal of time and effort. With the tightening of the CSR Directive implemented by the EU in 2023, which will extend reporting requirements to other aspects and a larger group of companies, this work becomes even more complex – especially if reports are evaluated manually.

The AI-based tool Sustain.AI makes this work easier. Thanks to machine text recognition, sustainability reports can now be analyzed in a highly efficient and structured way. The technology behind Sustain.AI is particularly aimed at auditors and controllers who can use the tool in their day-to-day work.

What are “Sustain.AI’s” quality features?

Time saving: The KI.NRW demonstrator allows for quick and efficient handling of sustainability reports and analysis of the required CSR criteria. With the help of AI language models, the text passages relevant to the respective criteria are filtered out. In this way, auditors can focus on the sections that are most relevant to the respective criterion.
Overview and context: With the integrated PDF viewer, the extracted text elements can be displayed in the report at any time. This allows users to immediately grasp the context of the passage.
Integrated feedback and adaptability: Users can evaluate the system’s suggestions using the built-in feedback system. This helps us to further train the AI model and continuously improve its quality. It is also capable of learning new criteria.

“Sustainability is increasingly becoming the focus of public attention. With the AI-supported tool Sustain.AI, it is possible to efficiently analyze and browse sustainability reports.”

Maren Pielka

Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS

Which AI technology is used in the KI.NRW demonstrator?

Language models

Modern language models are neural networks which are trained to predict a word by the context in which it appears. In this way, they learn an accurate representation for all words in the text and is capable of semantically comparing and classifying text passages.

Image recognition

PDF is a widely used unstructured file format. This means that although headings and tables are visually recognizable to readers, there is no internal structure. To be able to work with PDFs automatically, intelligent image processing algorithms are required to extract this structure from the images and correctly classify objects such as tables and paragraphs.

What does the AI demonstrator show?

The AI-supported suggestion system is an intelligent, intuitive search engine. You can upload your own documents as well as view existing reports. The reports can be searched and analyzed using a stored checklist from the “Global Reporting Initiative”, a widely used reporting framework for sustainability reporting.

Request a non-binding consultation with our experts now!

Curious? Click here to go straight to the demonstrator!

Try it out now!

Where can I find more information?

AI.map with entries around data analysis and forecasting

More AI providers, applications, and AI products “made in NRW” with the same AI focus can be found using the filter and search function of the AI.Map, which currently contains more than 1000 entries.

Go to the AI.Map

Study “Modern language technologies”

Find out where we encounter modern language technologies in everyday life and at work and what economic opportunities they offer.

Go to the study

Fraunhofer IAIS: Media Engineering

You can learn more about the topics of “Cognitive Business Optimization”, “Smart Coding and Learning”, and AI-based industrial image processing on the website of the IAIS Media Engineering department.

Go to the website

Contact the team of developers

Maren Pielka

Data Scientist and Team Leader Cognitive Text Analytics,
Business Area Cognitive Business Optimization,
Media Engineering Department

Fraunhofer IAIS
Schloss Birlinghoven
53757 Sankt Augustin

Phone +49 2241 14-2871

Send email

Lars Patrick Hillebrand

PhD Student / Research Assistant in Machine Learning,
Media Engineering Department

Fraunhofer IAIS
Schloss Birlinghoven
53757 Sankt Augustin

Phone +49 2241 14-1920

Send email

Speech and text comprehension

Roberta SPEAKER – Easily design your own dialog assistant

Advantages

Creativity & Innovation
Knowledge & Complexity reduction
Time efficiency & Agility

Functional areas

Marketing / Sales
Support / Customer service

To the demonstrator

→ Go to the »Roberta SPEAKER« clip

To overview

Roberta SPEAKER – Easily design your own dialog assistant

Develop your own dialog assistant in an intuitive way – with the visual, no-code programming interface »Open Roberta®«!

In which areas does the AI application offer the greatest benefit?

Speech technologies play a key role in the development of new digital services and technologies and already serve as a reliable assistant at home. Whether Alexa or Siri, voice communication with computers has long since arrived in everyday life: A quick question about the likelihood of rain or the risk of traffic jams on the way home, as well as controlling music or lights within your own four walls – communication with voice assistants is becoming increasingly common. But how can voice assistants be used in companies or even in schools?

Data-secure, customized – Roberta SPEAKER for companies and in education

The KI.NRW demonstrator »Roberta SPEAKER« allows even programming novices to develop dialog functions easily and intuitively on their own. Users from different industries can benefit from this: The technology enables companies to develop their own dialog assistants, for instance to control their machines via voice commands. In addition to the autonomous design of the dialogs, the advantages also include data security, because unlike many commercial voice assistants, Roberta SPEAKER does not require an internet connection – all data is processed locally. Teachers and educational stakeholders will also be able to use Roberta SPEAKER in the future to better teach young people about the use of AI technologies in everyday life and build their digital skills.

The programming language for dialog control is NEPO®, which is assembled on the open-source platform Open Roberta from Fraunhofer IAIS using »drag and drop«, thus avoiding obstacles such as typing or syntax errors. The speech recognition model can be adapted specifically to the user’s own requirements and thus run on a microcomputer. As a result, there is no need for expensive and complex hardware. For the communication between users and voice assistants, additional elements such as a microphone and speakers are also included.

The demonstrator was developed as part of the SPEAKER project funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK). The SPEAKER project aims to establish a leading voice assistance platform »made in Germany« for business-to-business (B2B) applications. The platform is intended to be open, modular, and scalable and provide technologies, services, and data via service interfaces. The consortium leaders are the Fraunhofer Institutes IAIS and IIS.

What are Roberta SPEAKER’s quality characteristics?

Low effort: The KI.NRW demonstrator shows that AI language models can work even on a small (portable) processor. This opens up innovative functional possibilities. One of the benefits is that the AI models work locally, so there is no need for an internet connection. This way, the Roberta SPEAKER box demonstrates that voice assistants can be implemented almost anywhere to interact with people and carry out simple tasks with little effort.
Intuitive and individually customizable: The intuitive programming interface allows everyone to easily develop functioning program sequences, so that students can generate their own voice commands using the demonstrator. The programming interface is the Open Roberta Lab, a freely available, data-secure, and open programming platform developed by the educational initiative »Roberta® – Learning with Robots« by Fraunhofer IAIS.
Easy communication: By using artificial intelligence, users can communicate with the voice assistants via spoken language. The dialog assistant understands questions and commands, can derive actions from the user’s intentions and can formulate answers and communicate these via the loudspeaker or derive actions.
Powerful and resource-saving: The voice-controlled box is only ready for use when the artificial intelligence technologies, the AI models, can function on a small processor. This is why the developers are focusing on resource-saving AI technology.

»Dialog systems are everywhere. With ›Roberta Speaker‹, we make it possible for anyone to create their own dialogs to control IoT devices using drag-and-drop with almost no prior knowledge.«

Thorsten Leimbach

Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS

Which AI technology is used in the KI.NRW demonstrator?

Automated Speech Recognition (ASR)

Technical systems capable of understanding spoken commands allow for natural communication between humans and machines. Speech recognition reliably converts spoken information into digital text in real time – even under difficult conditions, such as when there is background noise, as can occur in an industrial environment, for example, or when regional dialects are spoken.

Intent Recognition

Only domain-specific knowledge makes the language system useful in certain areas of application. Intent recognition, the recognition of intentions from the spoken text, plays a key role here. An intent classifier recognizes the subject of the text and searches for the factual answer. With the help of verbalization techniques, the system then ensures that the response is fully formulated.

Text-to-Speech (TTS)

In human-machine interaction, it is often an advantage when text information does not have to be read, from a display for instance, but is transmitted using natural speech. Based on deep learning technology, state-of-the-art algorithms generate highly natural-sounding speech output with excellent intelligibility and fluent intonation.

What does the AI demonstrator show?

The KI.NRW demonstrator »Roberta SPEAKER« allows both companies and students from different types of schools, such as secondary schools or vocational schools, to develop their own voice assistant using a simple programming interface. In this way, the expression »do it yourself« is given a new meaning and people can start learning about AI technologies without any prior knowledge.

Request a non-binding consultation with our experts now!

Where can I find more information?

Study »Modern language technologies«

Find out where we encounter modern language technologies in everyday life and at work and what economic opportunities they offer.

Go to the study

Roberta SPEAKER for companies

Are you interested in using Roberta SPEAKER to conduct AI trainings in your company or would you like to know how you can integrate the Fraunhofer language technology into your processes?

Enquire now!