Artificial Intelligence is a major opportunity and an ideal tool to improve patient care :Prashant Akhawat

Shahid Akhter, editor, ETHealthworld spoke to Prashant Akhawat, COO, Telerad Tech, Bangalore to know more about impact of artificial intelligence in teleradiology. Edited excerpts:

Artificial Intelligence changing the face of Healthcare
Artificial intelligence (AI) is going to transform the entire industry and different industry verticals. In healthcare it is going to impact in the form of data analytics or medical robotics, it could be in the me.dical imaging market, genomics or pristine medicines. If we see the artificial intelligence market, globally is going to grow around 200 billion USD overall and in healthcare segment itself we have seen around 1.4 billion USD in 2017 and it is going to grow 28 billion USD which is 2000% growth by 2025.

Impact of Artificial Intelligence in Radiology
In medical imaging, we see that AI is going to impact in a major way primarily in terms of patient care. It is going to improve the patient care and going to make the things affordable for the patient. AI primarily in the medical imaging analytics, it showcases bleeds in an emergency scenario or it could be screening programmes like TB and breast cancer which are primarily for multiple governments like, Mexico, Malaysia, Maldives, Singapore. Several of the governments have made it affordable or primarily made it free. So, In India also I think this something which is going to have government reduce the burden of healthcare and primarily has auto detections and AI tools implemented to enable the patient care in an efficient way.

Medical Imaging
In medical imaging, we see a major opportunity to improve patient care through AI. Today, there is a global shortage of Radiologists and in India, we see around 1 Radiologist for 100,000 wherein Bangladesh it 1:1 million and many parts of the world such as South Africa it is a worse situation. Teleradiology was the first step wherein Technology enabled by RIS / PACS Solution and it enabled Remote Read Services. Next Step is the integration of RIS/PCAS Solutions with AI algorithms. AI Algorithms, in fact, they are going to help in multiple ways – primarily it will help to reduce turnaround time by prioritizing the case in emergency scenarios like Brain Hemorrhage, Strokes, Fractures etc. and timely reporting is crucial; It will help in mass screening programs like TB, Breast Cancers Detection, Phenothrox, Emphysema etc. therefore it is going to help reduce the cost of the healthcare system for cross-multiple geographies for the governments. The most important thing what we see here is through AI algorithms the entire report which is generated will have specific details and primarily it will increase the efficiency and productivity of a radiologist where he can validate the output that is generated and in case he needs to add and sign the report.

Radiology Solutions by Telerad Tech
In the field of Radiology Telerad Tech primarily ventured into RIS-PACS Solutions and we are having our flagship product RADSPa for Radiology Imaging. Apart from this, we have solutions in cardiology – CardioSpa; clinical trials in radiology – Clinspa; telemedicine platform – VHelth365. So, RADSpa and VetSpa primarily are widely deployed products and we are having the deployment in more than 24 countries and it is being used in emergency radiology settings today. RADSpa is having a different implementation which could scale from a small diagnostic center to a large-scale multi-site multi-geography hospital, radiology service provider, imaging centers, and it could also be implemented in state government hospitals. We have the implementation in NHM Meghalaya and Tripura where our solution is deployed and running successfully. Now, in fact with the current trends, we have also ventured into artificial intelligence and medical image analytics domain which complements our RIS-PACS solutions. Primarily, the first stage was where we were providing technology to get the images to the radiology across any geography. Next step what we have taken to complement our technology solutions with a clinical technology where it is going to provide the critical clinical finding to a radiologist, in turn, making him more efficient and improving his efficiency. As well as it will help to reduce the cost burden on the patients as well.

Way Forward
We are planning to launch our new product MammoAssist, which is, in fact, a breast cancer screening project which will analyze the mammogram and will generate all the critical findings which a radiologist will be interested to see, and it will also generate whether the case in positive or negative or classification for that particular case. It is able to highlight the type of the tissue, which part of the breast whether the calcification is there, what kind of calcification is there, shape of the calcification lesion is there, where is it located in the breast and specific sizes of calcification or lesions or whether they are micro-calcification, clusters – that is something that is able to highlight all the critical findings for the Radiologist. At the same time, we are planning to launch it in 10 different languages namely Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Russian etc. So, that is something that we are going to have in a major way. As of now, we have tested our project on 5000 cases where our specificities are 100%, whatever our algorithm is detecting is negative that case is found as negative. With the findings what we are having we are going to provide API services which could be integrated with any EMR, EHR or RIS-PACS system and primarily these reports would be available to the radiologists where he could verify and sign the report. The major benefit of this project will go even to the government initiatives where it will help to reduce the cost burden of similar projects across multiple countries.

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