XraySetu: An assistance to doctors in diagnosing Covid-19
How Niramai leveraging Artificial Intelligence to help solve the problem of shortage of radiologists.
“Our healthcare system is collapsed” - this bareness in the words said by frontline workers and reported by journalists who witnessed and were overwhelmed by the covid crisis on the ground, silenced me in a way that little was through 2020. Our nation has endured a tragedy of unprecedented proportions. The second wave of Covid-19 ravaged India as hospitals and then crematoriums ran out of space. People struggled to find beds, oxygen or even required medicines to save their loved ones. While cities were hit, soon the second wave reached the smaller cities and rural parts of the country where the healthcare facility is often poor. Hundreds and thousands of people died due to poor or no access to good healthcare facilities.
This crisis has highlighted our fragile healthcare infrastructure and exposed us to its inability to tackle the second wave of Covid-19. One of the major challenges faced by the system in order to reduce the spread of Covid-19 was to quickly diagnose people with suspected Covid-19 symptoms and know whether they are infected, so they can receive appropriate treatment, self-isolate themselves immediately.
Currently, RT-PCR is used to diagnose Covid-19, which requires specialist equipment and takes at least 24-hours to produce results. As Covid-19 is a respiratory disease, it affects the lung regions, doctors may use radiological findings on the medical images as a faster method to diagnose people with Covid-19 symptoms. Hence Faster, cheaper, and reliable radiology services in smaller cities and rural parts of the country can assist in helping detect Covid-19 positive subjects and hence reduce transmission.
Flagging the gaps in the healthcare sector, shortage of specialist doctors is a major concern that was neglected by the policymaker for decades and now is haunting us. The radiologists are very few in numbers. There are only 10,000 radiologists in a country of 1.3 Billion people. For every 2.8 Lakh people, there is only and only 1 radiologist.
Leveraging technology to address the issue of shortage of Radiologists.
Artificial Intelligence is one of the technologies that has been around for more than a decade or more now and has been creating a buzz. There is an emerging consensus among global leaders in public health to leverage the potential of artificial intelligence in radiology and also in other critical components of the healthcare ecosystem. Many of the pathologies, oncology-based Indian startups like Nirmai Health Analytix, and companies are using artificial intelligence to solve complex healthcare problems like early detection of breast cancer.
As the technology to detect and diagnose is advancing, machines are getting smarter, cheaper, and accessible. The machines like ct-scan, x-rays, and ultrasounds can be deployed at scale and in remote regions at ease. There is no official data, but the health experts reveal that approximately 200-300 million scans are possibly conducted every year. Out of these, the vast majority would comprise of X-ray or ultrasound. Unfortunately, approximately 50%-60% of scans done in India, the majority of these being X-rays, go unreported by radiologists. This is attributed to a shortage of radiologists. Of these unreported examinations, the majority are performed in rural India.
XraySetu - Early intervention for COVID via WhatsApp
XraySetu is one such solution, that leverages a artificial intelligence to help and assist doctors in remote regions of the country to diagnose people with covid-19 symptoms.
XraySetu is a combined effort of Niramai Health Analytix, ARTPARK, and the Indian Institute of Sciences. It is an easy-to-use free service available on Whatsapp and can be used by doctors across India in order to diagnose a person with Covid-19 symptoms.
Doctors can click a picture of their patient’s X-ray image placed on a white-lit board using their mobile phones and send it to 8046163838 on WhatsApp.
The Xray Setu service analyses the sent chest x-ray image and generates a 2-page report within 10 to 15 minutes. The Report Includes the probability of diagnosed with Covid-19, markings of 14 other lung abnormalities, and the likelihood of infected with pneumonia. Based on the analyses in the report, the doctor can appropriately advise the patient.