APAMI 2026 brings medical informatics forum to Chengdu

APAMI 2026 opened on August 21 in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, bringing the Asia Pacific Association of Medical Informatics conference to western China for the first time. Initiated by the International Medical Informatics Association and the Asia-Pacific Association for Medical Informatics and hosted by the Bioinformatics Society of Sichuan province, the event gathered nearly 350 experts, clinicians and enterprise representatives from 12 countries to discuss digital health innovation, clinical deployment, academic collaboration and standards development.

Keynotes featured Peter L. Elkin, associated with medical semantic AI and the SCAI Semantic Clinical AI Framework, and Yves A. Lussier, known for translational bioinformatics, precision medicine, the N-of-1-pathways framework and early work on SNOMED expansion. Sessions addressed biomedical ontology, clinical semantic AI, trustworthy medical large language models, uncertainty-aware machine learning, nursing informatics, computational biology of ageing and industry translation.

The program focused on practical barriers to digital healthcare, including reasoning bias in medical AI, inconsistent data standards and the gap between research and clinical use. Foreign delegates also visited Chengdu medical institutions to observe smart wards, digital elderly care services and AI-powered clinical decision systems, supporting technical exchange and potential cross-border cooperation.