Opinion: AI reshaping healthcare screening from TB X‑rays to eye disease in Malaysia

Summary

Malaysia’s Oriental Daily publishes a commentary by writer Zeng Zhitao exploring whether AI can realistically enable nationwide health screening, using recent WHO and academic research as examples. The piece surveys AI tools that automatically read chest X‑rays for tuberculosis, a two‑stage cervical cancer screening system validated in Nature Communications, and Malaysia’s own DR.MATA program that pairs AI models with standard retinal cameras to detect diabetic eye disease in primary‑care clinics. It argues that Malaysia has favorable ingredients—dense clinic networks, a heavy burden of chronic disease, and new governance frameworks like a national AI office, ethics guidelines and medical‑AI usage norms—but still faces infrastructure gaps, data‑bias risks and unresolved liability questions when algorithms err. The author concludes that AI has brought the prospect of population‑scale early detection closer than ever, but warns that without stable policy, upgraded equipment and public trust, the technology will remain a promising pilot rather than a true shift in preventive medicine.