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Now, A Platform For Early Covid Detection Over WhatsApp. How It Works

XraySetu will help interpret Covid reports on real time basis and save precious time
XraySetu will help interpret Covid reports on real time basis and save precious time

Doctors in India, especially in rural heartland, are now able to diagnose Covid-19 infection on real time basis, as with the help of a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) based platform they get access to chest X-rays and can interpret their results over WhatsApp in a matter of a few minutes.

A new AI-driven platform is now helping in early intervention through rapid screening of Covid-19 with the help of chest X-ray interpretation over WhatsApp for doctors who have access to X-ray machines.

The solution called XraySetu can work with low-resolution images sent via mobiles, is quick and easy to use, and can facilitate detection in rural areas.

As Covid-19 continues to wreak havoc across the country, especially in rural India where test results take a lot of time to arrive, rapid testing has assumed a lot of significance in order to diagnose the infection in quick time. To know what it is and how it works, do read further ahead.

What is XraySetu?

ARTPARK (AI & Robotics Technology Park), a not-for-profit foundation established by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, with support from the Department of Science & Technology (DST), Government of India, in collaboration with Bangalore based HealthTech startup Niramai, has developed XraySetu specifically designed to identify Covid positive patients even from low-resolution chest X-Ray images sent over Whatsapp.

It also has semantic annotations of affected areas for review and localised heatmap by doctors to help them verify it easily with other modalities. The application has already served close to more than 1,200 reports so far from the interior parts of India.

How does it work?

To conduct the health check, any doctor simply needs to visit www.xraysetu.com and click on the ‘Try the Free XraySetu Beta' button. The platform will then redirect the person to another page, wherein he or she can choose to engage with the WhatsApp-based chatbot via web or smartphone application.

Otherwise the doctor can simply send a WhatsApp message to the phone number +91 8046163838 to start the XraySetu service. Then they just need to click the picture of the patient's X-ray and obtain the two-page automated diagnostics with annotated images in a few minutes.

While extending the probability of the Covid-19 contraction, the report also highlights a localised heatmap for a quick perusal of the doctor. 

Efficacy

The application has been tested and validated with over 1,25 000 X-ray images from National Institute of Health, United Kingdom, as well as over 1,000 Indian Covid patients. XraySetu, has shown excellent performance with sensitivity of around 98.86 per cent and specificity of 74.74 per cent.

Mr. Umakant Soni, Founder, and CEO, ARTPARK, said, “We need to scale technology for addressing the needs of 1.36 billion people, especially considering we have 1 radiologist for over 1 million people here. Built with the collaboration of industry and academia, XraySetu paves the way for exponential technologies like AI to leapfrog and provide cutting-edge healthcare technology to rural India in an extremely cost-effective manner."