NANNING, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- At the ongoing 22nd China-ASEAN Expo, Pham Trung Hieu, a medical student from Vietnam, leaned in and used his native tongue to ask a digital doctor, "Can kidney stones be inherited?"

To his delight, the cyber physician responded fluently in Vietnamese, explaining the genetic factors behind kidney stones with clinical precision. "Correct answer!" Hieu exclaimed with a smile.

The AI specialist avatar, embedded with Urologist Talk, a medical Q&A AI agent developed by the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, instantly became a star attraction.

Behind the small talk is serious science: 1.2 million characters of urology guidelines covering 387 diseases, a DeepSeek large model and two years of fine-tuning training.

"The bot now reasons at associate-chief-physician level," Li Lang, a professor at the university told Xinhua.

Its inception stems from the growing medical cooperation between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a 10-nation bloc home to about 700 million people.

As healthcare demand keeps rising across Southeast Asia, Guangxi -- China's only provincial-level region linked to ASEAN by both land and sea -- offers a natural bridge: comparable geographical conditions, similar disease profiles and, for years, a priority sector in two-way collaboration.

"Today's AI-driven healthcare services are mostly in English, built on Western clinical data and diets," said Li. "By rolling out ASEAN-language versions we can feed local eating habits and risk factors into the algorithm, tailor diagnosis and treatment for ASEAN users, and make sure they fully share in AI health dividends."

The avatar is now live on the hospital's online platform, providing services such as triage, post-operative checks, and 24-hour health chats.

The technology has also been embedded into physical robots that deliver professional services in outpatient clinics, wards and grassroots healthcare settings. Going forward, the hospital will expand the system to additional specialties and languages such as Thai, Myanmar and Khmer.

Unlike general-purpose large AI models, Urologist Talk confines its knowledge base strictly to the medical discipline. "It won't dish out random diagnoses the way some platforms do," said Hieu, who rates its accuracy at over 80 percent.

At this year's China-ASEAN Expo, smart solutions like the Urologist Talk avatar stole the spotlight, underscoring how AI is widening and deepening cross-border medical cooperation between China and ASEAN.

"This AI model stretches the reach of high-quality medical resources," explained Professor Zheng Baoshi of the university. "It digitizes top specialists' expertise for round-the-clock service, removes geographical barriers and greatly improves the accessibility and efficiency of healthcare."  ■