Alibaba open-sources 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 that can identify nearly 150 abdominal conditions — including cancers — by reading computed tomography (CT) scans. The release marks the latest step in the company's expanding medical AI efforts.

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

Damo Radar was trained using CT scans paired with clinical reports. Across nearly 40,000 real-world examinations, it achieved an average area under the curve (AUC) of 0.913 across 146 clinical findings, on a scale where 1.0 represents perfect diagnostic accuracy.

The research team said the training method could eventually be extended to other types of medical imaging, describing the model as "the world's first expert-level generalist medical imaging model."