Video Credits: DeepTek, YouTube
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a very important concept when it comes to problem solving even in the Medical field. Employing AI helps in reducing the probability of misdiagnosis. Just like human doctors, AL systems too need to be properly trained in order to be considered qualified enough of conducting diagnosis.
DeepTek, an Indian med tech startup is also venturing the AI in medicine concept. DeepTek company was founded in the year 2017 by Ajit Patil and Amit Kharat. Ajit Patil has a Master’s degree from IIT Kharagpur and has completed his schooling from SSPMS school. He completed his engineering degree from COEP in the year 1992. Amit Kharat on the other hand has acquired his PhD in Radiology. He also has an extensive working experience in the Radiology space for the past 17 years.
Radiology is all about images, be it MRI or CT scans or X rays. And Artificial Intelligence (AI) is very powerful on image analytics. To simply explain the concept of radiology AI, it means analyzing the images derived from the MRI or CT scans or X rays and identifying the disease or pathology. It also analyzes to what extend it has infected or progressed.
Until the year 2013, Ajit Patil was working for the company Vertex. He then decided to venture into entrepreneurship. Speaking about this, Ajit Patil says, “In 2017, I was talking to Tsyoshi Kitani, then CTO of NTT Data. He mentioned that they were interested in radiology AI. They had a product in the US which was used in 1,000 hospitals there. In AI, data is the oil and without data you cannot do AI. Kitani said they had the data and wanted to explore something in this space and if I could do something, they will look at it. I started researching. I met almost 30 to 40 people including industry experts, educational experts, AI experts, and radiologists.”
He further adds, “In 2017, we started working on the model. We did a few things initially and then we approached NTT DATA again. NTT DATA took an immediate interest and decided to invest in our company in 2018. One of the earlier investors, Mitsui also expressed their interest and their group company Nobori, Japan’s largest Cloud PACS provider, came on board as a strategic investor. Aniruddha Pant helped us develop the data science experts’ team. We have a total team of 70 people, including 20 radiologists and 40 data science and technology experts, along with a strong leadership team. This combination is a unique thing we have created so far.”
Ajit Patil also said that Radiology AI has vast amount of opportunities to offer. Other countries such as Japan, Israel and the US have already started exploiting this sector. The solution that has been developed by DeepTek has been proved to be very effective on X rays. This is because it is programed to automatically identify 20 pathologies.
When it comes to detecting covid symptoms, CT scans have been proved to be very effective. This is because CT scan contains a certain kind of patches, these patches indicate the covid infection. A lot of research has been done about this topic globally. DeepTek along with Nanavati Hospital and Ruby Hall Clinic (RHC) has conducted a research too.
DeepTek has also partnered with the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC). They provide artificial intelligence enabled solutions for tuberculosis screening and triage from digital x rays of ones chest.
