BEIJING, April 18 (Xinhua) -- The following is a summary of published science and technology news of China.

AI PLATFORM

A group of Chinese scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that doubles the detection rate for early-stage esophageal cancer.

Esophageal cancer is often asymptomatic, but experienced clinicians can detect tumors and precancerous lesions with endoscopies. The five-year survival rate is over 90 percent when the tumor is treated during the early stages, while the clinical outcomes decline sharply once patients start experiencing symptoms.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Science Translational Medicine, described an architecture driven by deep learning algorithms, which are trained via datasets of more than 190,000 esophageal images gathered from several clinics in China.

MAMMAL'S BRAIN

A group of Chinese scientists identified how a specific region of neuron clusters in a mammal's brain encodes the time of the day. This finding lends new clues to deciphering human beings' biological clock design at a systematic level.

The suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) is known as the mammalian central circadian pacemaker, and different types of neurons act in concert while each neuron harbors a self-sustained molecular clockwork. But how system-level SCN signals record time was mysterious.

The researchers from Peking University used a high-speed dual-view two-photon microscope they developed to realize calcium ion imaging of up to 9,000 neurons in adult SCN slices. Then, they leveraged artificial intelligence (AI) methods to understand the meanings of those signals as a whole.

COMMERCIAL SPACE INDUSTRY

China will continue to promote the healthy and rapid development of its commercial space industry by creating a good environment and expanding the scale of the industry with standardized supervision and management, a senior official of the China National Space Administration (CNSA).

Last year's Central Economic Work Conference called for nurturing strategic emerging industries such as the commercial space industry, and this year's government work report proposed to actively build the commercial space industry as a new growth engine, both showing that China's commercial space industry has entered a new stage, said Lyu Bo, deputy director of the Department of System Engineering of CNSA, at a press conference in Beijing. Enditem

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