In this difficult situation, the field that needs the most important consideration is the healthcare sector. As the whole world is fighting the battle against this pandemic, an Indian start-up has developed X-ray technology to track the progression of Covid-19 in the lungs, using Artificial Intelligence.
Qure.ai, Mumbai based start-up builds the software that incorporated AI that scans a chest X-Ray and provides the progress report, whether a patient was getting better as a result of the treatments done.
Qure.ai was founded by Prashant Warier and Dr. Pooja Rao in 2016. Which uses the AI developed on a database of over seven million scans to provide accurate results of radiology scans within a minute. More recently, the company has tweaked its algorithms that can detect about 19 chest abnormalities, to help with monitoring the progress of the novel Coronavirus inside a patient.
Named qXR, the software becomes especially important in a place like India, to prioritize patients who need immediate attention, both from a cost perspective as well as pressure on the existing healthcare infrastructure. The qXR solution has previously been used for tuberculosis screening as well.
Prashant Warier, co-founder and chief executive officer at Qure.ai said,
“We asked ourselves if we could build technology that can automatically interpret radiology images and improve the quality of care provided in areas where there is no radiologist access and that’s how we came about working on this idea.”
“We are looking at where the abnormalities are, which part of the lung is affected, what kind of abnormalities are there as well as their size, and then using all that information to create a COVID-19 score, which indicates whether somebody is high-, medium-, or low-risk for COVID-19” Warier added.
From a business perspective, Qure.ai has seen great growth in recent times. In the previous year, they had only 8-10 sites, but now it has grown to more than 70 sites across more than 25 countries. Also, the number of scans per day has grown from 100-200 to 5,000-10,000 in this year. Qure.ai raised $16 million in a funding round led by Sequoia India in February.
