Eye For Innovation

Five companies launched and modified products to address health care needs and simplify treatment during the pandemic.

- NAINI THAKER

Qure.ai: (X-)Ray of Hope

In early March, Prashant Warier quickly realised the loopholes that existed in the global health care infrastructure. Like most health-tech startups, Qure.ai also repurposed its chest X-ray solution, qXR, to help triage for Covid-19 and monitor its progression. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to interpret chest X-rays within seconds. Warier, who is CEO and founder, says, “We have a database of 2.5 million chest X-rays that has been used to train our ML algorithms.” The solution has been deployed in over 40 sites, across 30 countries.

Qure.ai—a grantee of India Health Fund, an organisation seeded by Tata Trusts to identify and support breakthrough innovations—is in talks with several global organisations and governments to use its technology to ramp up Covid-19 testing. So far, qXR has been deployed in 40 hospitals in South Asia, Europe and North America, and has processed 5,000 suspected Covid-19 cases per week.

Taking the solution a step further, Warier and his team introduced products catering specifically to health care workers. “For instance,” says Warier, “we launched qTrack, a disease management platform that allows health care workers to go door-to-door with just a smartphone to identify cases. It helps in location tagging for door-to-door screenings and hotspot mapping. It has the capability to take a picture of an analogue chest X-ray film and get qXR results on it.”