Home Announcements LPU Students Build AI That Helps Patients When Doctor Is Not Available

LPU Students Build AI That Helps Patients When Doctor Is Not Available

November 26, 2019

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Shivanshu Mathur and Raghav Jain, two students pursuing their BTech in Computer Science Engineering at Lovely Professional University, have won the second prize at the NEC India Hackathon 2019 organized by HackerEarth. They received a cash prize of Rs. 1.5 lakh for developing a software they call Medikare. And if it can be tweaked and perfected, it could revolutionize the state of public healthcare in rural India.

Medikare is basically an artificial intelligence software that can perhaps replace a doctor in the diagnosis phase. It essentially uses its machine learning algorithms to analyse the symptoms a patient has, as well as the reports of any medical tests they can provide, and figure out what illness they may be suffering from. Essentially, it’s an automated diagnostician for when you don’t have access to a human one.

In remote locations where there are no doctors at all, this could perhaps provide some form of aid to people in need of medical attention. It would require someone with knowledge of how to operate the system, or would have to be designed with easy usage in mind. But that’s still easier to do than have a years-long trained doctor on hand.

Even in places with doctors though, Medikare can help speed things along. Especially if there’s only one doctor for a few hundred people for instance, this could ensure that diagnosis is made faster, so the doctor can get to also prescribing treatments for the ill, without them having to wait in line for days just to see a medical professional.

Aside from that, an AI would also objectively consider diseases a doctor may not, because they might have a preconceived notion of what a patient is suffering from”The doctor-patient ratio in India is less than desired,” Shivanshu Mathur said. “On top of it, a considerable amount of a doctor’s time goes in basic diagnosis. With our solution, all this time can be saved and be used for treating more patients while the technology takes care of diagnosis. I would love to work towards building a solution like this.”

Mathur and Jain were two of 731 contestants taking part in this two month-long Hackathon, from some of India’s top universities. But they didn’t have to just conceptualise something, the teams in the final round also had to build a working prototype.

“For a country like ours, marrying technology to medicine is imperative,” said Raghav Jain. “What is also interesting is the role of data analytics and machine learning, a technology that in one instance can be used to sell more credit cards, while in the other instance can actually help save lives!”