The SIHA AI Mobile-Based On-Device Medical Screener
The SIHA AI Screener Mobile Smartphone Application has been developed using the latest bleeding edge Computer Vision AI technologies to solve an evergreen problem – that of access to affordable and accurate diagnostic systems on the go – to the people who need it the most – the populations in the Global South where 75% of the world’s 8 billion people live. The world has made great strides in ensuring that a great many people have access to the prevention and treatment of tropical diseases. But, the world has fallen short of providing effective diagnostic solutions to these diseases with most of the existing solutions – such as Rapid Diagnostic Testing Kits – falling way short of the mark.
The SIHA AI Screener uses the latest State-of-the-Art (SoTA) in Computer Vision (CV) to make a quick, accurate diagnosis of any illness by simply taking a photo of the slide using an ordinary smartphone attached to a microscope with up to 99% accuracy all within a matter of seconds thus ensuring better healthcare outcomes for all – especially those in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) whose access to such services often means the difference between life and death.
The SIHA Artificial Intelligence “Inference Engine”
The “inference engine” which is effectively the engine of our patents-pending solution uses Deep Learning – a branch of AI/Machine Learning which is loosely based on the mammalian brain – with respect to how it processes image data. This enables the computer to gain a very fine-grained understanding of the images that it is “looking at” and as such is able to determine and distinguish with uncanny precision the various disease-causing pathogens effectively providing timely, life-saving diagnoses to those in need.
Initially, the SIHA AI Screener will focus on providing diagnosis for malaria – the oldest disease known to man – which is a fatal disease that infected more than 241 million people and resulted in 627,000 deaths globally in the year 2020 according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Of these 627,000 deaths, 95% were children under the age of 5 (U5) who are without exception located along the malaria belt in Sub – Saharan Africa. One of the main reasons for these fatalities is without a doubt the lack of access to timely, affordable, and accurate diagnostic services.
The SIHA AI Screener is envisioned to make an impact on malaria and other tropical diseases which collectively are responsible for the deaths of up to 33% of the U5s a whopping 7,000,000 million deaths. Ultimately, our screener will incorporate the diagnosis of other debilitating diseases into its core mobile-based deep learning platform to accelerate point-of-care testing and diagnostic service provision to those who need it, wherever they need it.