Man and Superman: India’s Prospects in the Age of AI (Part 3)

Tuberculosis is still rampant in the more resource-constrained areas of the world from India, Southeast Asia, and South Africa. There are about 10 million to 11 million TB cases every year. It’s still a problem. A lot of people still die from TB. So here, we have Indian AI technology addressing a big medical problem, and having a huge impact.

Qure.ai also offers a stroke care product that can quickly assess the need for different categories of intervention within 5 minutes, saving lives, saving money, making healthcare fast and scalable.

Chest X-rays have a high volume. Head CT Scan requires speed. AI can manage volume and speed. Head CTs are taken when you’re looking at critical cases. When you want to do something quickly, you do a CT. You need a fast interpretation. For a stroke patient, for every minute that goes by, brain cells are dying. You want to intervene quickly.

Intervention is sometimes slow, especially at night because radiologists are not available. But why wait? Why not use AI to interpret these scans? The use cases are simple. There are two kinds of treatments for stroke. 

One is thrombolytic and the other is thrombectomy. Thrombolytic is when you administer an anticoagulant which will dissolve the clot in the brain. If you administer it to someone who has a bleed, their bleed will worsen. It will be fatal. You want to rule out a bleed so you can administer that thrombolytic agent. That is what AI is able to do within a minute. 

Second is to perform a thrombectomy. For that, you have to look at a larger area. That’s also something AI can do and with great speed.

These are just a few examples from a single company. There’s a tremendous amount of work going on in AI-driven healthcare from drug discovery to diagnostic imaging to personalized medicine to robotic surgery.

We’ve just seen successful vaccine development for Covid take place within a year. This is accelerating even further. Most experts believe that the Covid pandemic is not the last one we will see. So it’s good to know that humanity will have AI to help cope with future pandemics and have rapid vaccine development technology on hand when we get hit again with another virus.

All this makes me tremendously optimistic about the possibilities of caring for 1.5 billion people in India, and 10 billion human beings on our planet. 

Indian technologists and entrepreneurs are going to play a big role in both.

We will, within a couple of decades, arrive at a point where even the most remote parts of the planet are well-served by modern medicine. There will be AI doctors and AI surgeons administering new drugs and treatments invented by AI algorithms.

Medicine, today a privilege of those who can afford, CAN become universally available, as a democratic right of all human beings. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : Man and Superman: India's Prospects in the Age of AI
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