It is well known that innovative technologies, including those using artificial intelligence, can significantly improve the quality and accessibility of medical care, and therefore they are actively being introduced into the healthcare systems of developed countries.
Improve diagnostic accuracy and early detection of diseases through medical image and data analysis, streamline processes and reduce medical errors through decision support systems, accelerate the development of new drugs and treatments through artificial intelligence modeling, increase the efficiency of administrative tasks and reduce the burden on medical staff, remote monitoring of patients’ conditions and the provision of medical consultations – this is an incomplete list of what the achievements of modern science can provide when they are directed in a peaceful direction, and government officials responsible for their implementation are interested in obtaining practical results.
Of course, it would be quite strange to expect the occupiers in the Crimea to massively introduce medical innovations based on artificial intelligence for the local population. Here it is enough to recall the repeatedly described “long-term construction” of Crimean and Sevastopol hospitals and the scandals associated with the purchase of equipment for them. But at the same time, the occupied peninsula became a huge rear medical hub for the aggressor, where new “naval hospitals” were announced, and the aggressor “repurposed” a number of “departmental sanatoriums” from health resorts into actual evacuation hospitals for its “cannon fodder”. Therefore, the constant “white noise” of the occupiers about supposedly “federal projects for digitalization and automation of the healthcare system” on the peninsula still deserves study. What role does artificial intelligence play in this, and is it worth putting these words in quotation marks in this case? – Associate Professor Andrey Chvalyuk studied specifically for the Association of Reintegration of Crimea.
The first attempts by the aggressor to play “artificial medical intelligence” were noted in 2020, when the fake “department of health care” in Sevastopol “issued order No. 1037” regarding the “procedure and conditions for conducting a pilot project on the use of the intelligent system for analyzing medical images “IRYM” in medical organizations” in city.
The project provided for “cooperation” with the aggressor’s “National agency for social communications” of the with “information and organizational support” from “MIAC”. In fact, the main function of the “IRYM” system, supposedly developed to help radiologists, was stated to be “analysis of chest computed tomography data to identify signs of the presence of COVID-19 coronavirus infection and the stage of the disease”. The aggressor announced “testing of the system” “on the basis of five Sevastopol hospitals”, No. 1, No. 4, No. 9, children’s No. 5 and an oncology clinic.
In the best traditions of occupation propaganda, the above-mentioned “order No. 1037” provided for anything except a public report on the “results of the pilot project” and some position on what, in fact, should be done next with the “IRYM” system. This suggests that the results were either not important for the process of “developing allocated federal funds”, or that they were known in advance to all “managers” who initiated the project.
To confirm this hypothesis, it is worth taking a closer look at the developer of the “IRYM” system. Registered in 2019, with an authorized capital of 250 thousand rubles, “Airim LLC” has been unprofitable since its inception. The company is a resident of the “GAU IT Park” technology park in Tatarstan and a Skolkovo participant since 2020. As indicated on their page on the Skolkovo website, experiments on the use of the company’s software, and in particular “artificial intelligence for radiation diagnostics, were carried out in 12 regions, 66 medical institutions, and 4 leading national medical research centers”. It was stated that “artificial intelligence services have been implemented in 8 regional medical institutions and 2 national medical research centers”, but for some reason the list of medical institutions was not disclosed.
Now “Airim” continues to suffer losses and is not even able to continue paying for a personal domain name, which is why it has lost its website. The software developer does not have his own website – this is probably only possible for the aggressor. But even being on the verge of bankruptcy, “Airim” continues to promote its “MAMMOLens” software, supposedly applicable “to detect signs of malignant neoplasms of the mammary gland”. At the same time, the company “for some reason” is silent about the fate of the previous project – the “IRYM” system. However, we found news that with the help of the “IRYM” software package in 2020, they also “tried to improve the accuracy of diagnosing diseases and screening studies in mammology, identifying malignant tumors, and reducing the likelihood of medical errors”. It was announced that “the system is supposedly based on artificial intelligence technologies and big data analysis and includes a separate module for assessing lung damage in COVID-19 disease”.
Here is such a universal system, which doesn’t care about oncology or a viral infection: the result of the work is still provided by such an “element of artificial intelligence” as the installation operator. Because after 2020, the occupiers “for some reason” stopped writing about this “slightly artificial intelligence”: either the previously tested software package “underwent a complete rebranding in three years” or, more likely, the “pilot project” failed. It is obvious that the task of introducing it into the healthcare sector of the occupied territories was not set by the aggressor, but everything was focused on the development of, albeit not significant, on an overall scale, mass thefts in the healthcare of Crimea, but still the “investments” that “Airim” received for carrying out its “pilot project”.
The scam with the “intelligent system for analyzing medical images” “IRYM” (CT COVID 19) was not the only “pilot project” from the occupiers that was declared in the Crimea in recent years. In addition to this, they talked about “testing the software complex of the core of a telemedicine system for remote consultations at the federal level”, and about the “pilot implementation” of the “Laboratory information system” based on the “Russian operating system Astra Linux” as part of the “import substitution program and transition to Russian software”.
Let us note that in addition to the medical field, the “special-purpose operating system” “Astra Linux special edition”, the “Smolensk” release, was allegedly “introduced in the Crimea into the work of a unified duty dispatch service” “System-112”. In the corresponding “tender”, not only the criminal “Ministry of emergency situations” and the “state institution” “Safe Region” were “noted”. It is extremely characteristic that the notorious “telecommunications company” “Miranda Media” was declared to be the criminal “project executor”, this time as a “local supplier of licensed domestic software” and as a “partner” from “Astra Linux”. It is characteristic that, according to the aggressor’s propaganda, “the emergency services of the Crimea were one of the first to be transferred by the occupiers to the Russian operating system”, while Russian regions continued to use the software of the “decaying West”, which supposedly “due to sanctions no longer received the necessary resources and scheduled updatesfor their work”.
However, let’s return to medicine. Propaganda “news” that “any day now artificial intelligence will work in Sevastopol hospitals” still continue to be regularly broadcast by the aggressor, despite the fact that the results of previous attempts at “digitalization” are very contradictory. For example, at the end of 2022, information circulated en masse in the occupation “media” that supposedly in the second quarter of 2023, “an artificial intelligence system will be fully operational in medical institutions in Sevastopol, which will monitor the dynamics of the patient’s condition and help the doctor in making decisions”. The “legs” of the news grew from the “meeting” of the criminal “government” of occupied Sevastopol, held on December 2, 2022.
As the criminal “deputy governor” of Sevastopol Alexander Kulagin explained the “essence of innovations”, allegedly “over two years, an archive of images was collected and digitized, which are stored in a single database, so that the doctor could look at the old image and track the dynamics”, and then “an element of artificial intelligence, when the doctor receives a “hint” that in a particular image there are either changes in dynamics or some pathological points”. It is possible that we are talking about the same “IRYM”, but then it is clear that after two years of the “project” it was dedicated only to the creation of some kind of “archive of images”, and not to helping the patients themselves. And what, in fact, was the “effectiveness” of “artificial intelligence” Kulagin kept silent about. We suspect that only the funds allocated for the “digitalization of healthcare” were used effectively.
Let us recall that this process became a meme of occupation propaganda both before the “IRYM” scam and before Kulagin’s announcements, namely since 2018. Then Vladislav Nusinov, who later became a defendant in a “criminal case,” “managed” the illegal “medical information and analytical center” of the occupiers. It is interesting that in addition to Kulagin, the criminal “head of the health department” Alexandra Osipova also reported that “in the second quarter of 2023, an automatic medical image processing system will be operational in Sevastopol hospitals.” However, so far the occupiers have not even generated any abstract statements on this matter, and therefore it is obvious that no one has launched any “system”.
From the fake “innovations” in the “city medical institutions” of occupied Sevastopol, let’s move on to the “private medical institutions” there. The aggressor’s propaganda broadcasts the stories of the “ultrasound diagnostics doctor of the first category” Sergei Kovtun from the so-called “treatment and diagnostic center” “Medical”, who “as an example of innovation” and almost “artificial intelligence” cites “the Sono AVC program, which automatically calculates the number, size and volume of anechoic structures and formations based on a volumetric image during ultrasound diagnostics,” as well as “the Sono VCAD program, which allows you to standardize the orientation of images of the fetal heart in standard projections, automatically generated based on the resulting volumetric object”.
However, all these “innovations” in “automation of ultrasound image acquisition” do not actually relate to artificial intelligence and are technologies twenty years ago. For example, Sono AVC (Automatic Volume Calculation) is an automatic volume calculation technology developed by the American company GE Healthcare of Illinois for use in their ultrasound systems such as the Voluson E8. Sono VCAD (Sonography based Volume Computer Aided Diagnosis) is also a standard built-in feature of the Voluson E8 ultrasound machine. I think it will not surprise anyone that this medical device was completely developed, built and put into mass production by the same American company “GE Healthcare” back in 2006.
Calling 2006 technology innovation now is like bragging about a camera phone. But since the occupiers do not have their own innovations, they proudly present the achievements of others’ intellectual work. By the way, although Western countries did not prohibit manufacturers from supplying the Kremlin with medical equipment, this process was complicated due to large-scale Russian aggression. Many parts of medical equipment are used by the aggressor for another purpose, and therefore their import by the Kremlin is now prohibited by sanctions. These include, for example, X-ray tubes, the main part of an X-ray machine or CT scanner. However, it is precisely in the field of image diagnostics that the occupiers clearly do not work out with artificial intelligence.
In conclusion, here is another unfulfilled plan of the occupiers in the field of “digitalization of medical care” in Crimea, where one could also hear a lot about “artificial intelligence”. We are talking about the so-called “federal project” “Creation of a unified digital circuit in healthcare based on a unified state information system in the field of healthcare (Unified state health information system).” The essence of the “project” was stated to be “the introduction of electronic document management, including telemedicine technologies, electronic doctor’s appointments, electronic prescriptions”, as well as “the creation of mechanisms for interaction between medical organizations based on the Unified state health information system, the introduction of digital technologies and platform solutions”. For example, it was planned that by 2024, both in Russia and in the territories it occupied, “a system of electronic prescriptions and automated management of preferential drug provision will be operational”.
However, in September 2023, the occupiers stated that the “Tzifrozdrav” organization, which was declared to be “the operator of the experiment to create a federal register of electronic prescriptions for medicines”, “stopped work on the project, thereby disrupting the deadlines for its implementation” and “now the Russia’s Ministry of health will implement this project on your own.” At the same time, allegedly “due to the lack of a unified federal register, regions are still deciding for themselves how to implement an electronic prescription system”.
According to the criminal “head” of the Crimean “Roszdravnadzor department,” “the situation with prescription medications does not change: the current forms of medical prescriptions do not have a series and number that could be entered into the digital monitoring system”. In the rural areas of the occupied peninsula, the situation is even worse – many rural medical and obstetric centers do not work because they are “under licensing”, are not connected to the Internet, or simply have a “staff shortage”. In principle, there is nothing surprising for residents of occupied Crimea in the absence of an “electronic prescription for the entire range of medications”, since they do not have regular prescriptions, and simply do not have a number of medications in clinics and pharmacies. And taking into account the fact that most of the popular drugs, starting last year, cannot be purchased in pharmacies on the peninsula without a prescription, the situation is becoming critical.
And while the fake occupiers’ “officials” are actively promoting themselves on the topic of “introducing artificial intelligence into the healthcare system” and stealing funds allocated for “digitalization of the industry”, the mortality rate in Crimea is already more than 1.5 times higher than the birth rate. However, it can be stated that it is in the field of medicine, in contrast to the previously studied sphere of “dual technologies” associated with drone sprayers and plant monitoring, that the occupiers have no particular interest in artificial intelligence, even in the field of industrial espionage. The general message “women are still giving birth” remains an indisputable axiom for the Kremlin, and therefore the aggressor is preparing provocations in the field of artificial intelligence in a number of other directions.
