Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to help doctors with precision diagnosis
Africa has one of the lowest physician densities in the world. With a ratio of 1.6 health workers per 1,000 people, it’s almost impossible to deliver quality care to people in this part of the world. Apart from doctors being overwhelmed by an ever-increasing number of patients, Physicians may not be familiar with patient conditions or at times they might be dealing with a condition that has similar symptoms to another disease familiar to them. This creates the perfect recipe for medical errors which can be fatal at times.
Cameroonian Gael Kamdem De Teyou saw this gap and founded Bright Medicals in 2022. A holder of a doctorate degree in computer science, Gael developed a comprehensive web application that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide automated, fast, and repeatable analysis of medical images that are accurate as those performed by expert physicians. “Our idea is to enable them to work more efficiently by building tools that can analyze medical images and give them some insight,” says Gael.
With field expertise in machine learning, signal processing and computer vision, Gael works as the Chief Technology Officer at the company with Gloria, a medical degree holder and currently completing her residency training in paediatrics at the University of Yaounde 1, as the CEO.
The two are supported by three other key people. Jordan is the head of software engineering. “He holds almost all what we are doing,” Gael adds. Raissa Mbeng is the Chief Health Scientist. She’s in charge of the company’s health policy and designs the guidelines that they have to follow to make sure that what they do is according to the book. Ghislaine Nganyou, the director of the Medical Diagnostic Center of Yaoundé (MEDICY), a medical imaging lab, is the company’s advisor. She helps the company to connect with the imaging lab.
Testing the waters in Cameroon
Gael says that the DNA of the company is to ensure the health and well-being of Africa’s population by making clinical diagnosis data-driven, intelligent, and patient-focused. “We want to revolutionize medicine in Africa by automating medical diagnosis and making it more precise and more accurate.” The company is currently working with 2 hospitals, a medical company, and an imaging lab located all in Cameroon where the healthcare system is particularly overwhelmed and needs urgent support to improve access to care. From his conversation with doctors, Gael reveals that demand for technology such as theirs exists, only the supply is lacking. “We have talked with a lot of physicians, and they really need help. They are hoping that we will come up with solutions very soon,” he points out.
What Gael and his team are developing is not entirely new in the world. He notes that in general, medical equipment vendors have software that can deliver a quick analysis of medical images. However, this software uses AI models that are trained on datasets that misrepresent the African population. As a result, these models are prone to variability and biases.
He and his time however want to correct this anomaly to further improve the accuracy of the medical setting. “We work with local clinics and local imaging labs to collect our own data on the field that truly represent the population a healthcare professional meets day to day,” he says. This data is being used already to test its effectiveness. “We are currently testing our prototype with one clinic in Cameroon. It helps us to have some feedback from healthcare professionals. After that, we will deploy our minimum viable product (MVP).”
As medical data can be a tricky subject, Gael notes that confidentiality is key and that his company takes great care to ensure this is observed during the entire process. “We preserve the medical secrets. Our data are encrypted, end to end with our tools and we do two-step authentication to make sure that no one has access to the data.” The company goes further than that. “We do not collect the personal information of a patient like their name and their address,” Gael reveals adding that the company also does not share its data with other parties.
A seamless online experience
Bright Medical operates in the cloud platform which makes its tools easily accessible online. When used during diagnosis, the platform uses technologies to analyze medical images geometrical images such as Xray, MRIs and ultrasounds and sends back reports with insight which the doctor can then use to accurately make a diagnosis. “It is available online everywhere anywhere and you just need an internet connection. Whether you are on a laptop, on the desktop or on the phone the platforms are available to you,” Gael says.
A prototype which will be deployed once the development phase is completed will even be better at diagnosing diseases. Gael reveals that the prototype will be equipped with deep learning algorithms that can analyze the visual content of a medical image and extract regions of interest (ROIs) for different organs such as Lung, Heart, Brain and Breast. The algorithm can group medical images into categories of diseases and optimizes the next step of the diagnosis.
AI technologies are well suited to analyze data and uncover patterns and insights that humans could not find on their own, making them an ally when it comes to medical diagnosis. Other benefits to healthcare include automating tasks and analyzing big patient data sets to deliver better healthcare faster, and at a lower cost. According to Insider Intelligence, 30% of healthcare costs are associated with administrative tasks. “We plan to take advantage of these benefits to find more efficient ways to modernize our healthcare ecosystems. We believe AI will have a profound impact in creating more efficiencies and breakthroughs that today we can yet imagine,” says Gael.
Bright Medical uses technologies to break down how medicine is being performed in Africa. “Even if we trust our doctors, sometimes they can be tired or overwhelmed, and sometimes also because they are human their eye may not have a good vision when they analyze an image,” Gael explains. “This is why technology is there to see beyond what the human can see. We really want to extract every detail of what is inside an image.”
No success without setbacks
Innovating to improve healthcare in Africa has however not been a walk in the park. Gael tells that setbacks were experienced in both the health and computer engineering field. On the medical side, it was majorly a communication problem, Gael discloses. Sometimes we couldn’t understand what the doctor was saying; other times it’s the doctors who could not us. “The doctors were very skeptical about what we are doing at the beginning. Later we realized that doctors’ questions could be solved with artificial intelligence which in the end made everyone happy.”
Limitations on what you can do with computer engineering models also dragged the company’s progress. Initially, the company wanted to build an MVP that can provide a diagnostic report for several organs like the breast, lungs, brain or breast. But it was complicated to collect the data for all these organs simultaneously. “Finally, we decided to start with the lungs, and considered only one-use case”. Another problem was the infrastructure needed to train and deploy the AI models. Gael says they solved this by applying to Microsoft Founder Hub and were given cloud credits and access to development tools to build their platform.
We plan to make our product robust and deploy it by next year. We want to improve the product to have something mature for the industry
Gael Kamdem De Teyou – CTO, Bright Medicals
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Early wins inspire confidence
The biggest milestone that Bright Medical has had so far is that they have built a use case for COVID-19 and pneumonia that doctors in Cameroon are currently working with. The use case was a project with students and has been very successful so far.
Bright Medical also recently participated in the first AI Builders Garage competition accelerator, a competition on how artificial intelligence can be used and leveraged to solve problems in emerging countries. The competition was held on December 1st, 2022 at the virtual Flapmax Artificial Intelligence Summit (FAI) organized by the Flapmax AI Institute, with a focus on digital transformation for emerging markets. Bright Medical won the second prize for the Youth Entrepreneurship track. “The program will start next year, it is the first prize that we won,” Gael adds.
In December 2022, they were among the 30 innovators in Africa selected among more than 900 applicants to join the Francophone African Incubator. They are among the 40 companies that have been pre-selected. “The final selection will be happening soon. Those are the two awards that we have won, and more achievements are coming in the future,” he says.
As the company scores its first wins, it is also committing itself to saving the planet. “We are working mainly remotely. It helps us to reduce pollution due to transportation,” Gael says. He adds that they share their information digitally, and all their reports are available on the Internet removing the need for paper. “Our idea is to record our medical information digitally so that we can save space and paper. We believe that if people are healthy, that is also going to be good for the planet,” Gael adds.
Ensuring every African doctor avoids errors
Bright Medical is currently focusing on Cameroon and will soon be going to the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) region. The CEMAC region consists of six countries: Chad, Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and Central African Republic. “The problem is almost the same everywhere. In Cameroon, Uganda, Tanzania, doctors have the same issues. They need technologies that can help them to work with precision. It is important for us to make sure that every doctor in Africa can use our technology to do to work efficiently and avoid errors.”
“This year, the first one is Cameroon, year 2 is CEMAC and in year 3 we will explore more opportunities in the whole of Africa. We want to attack a large market progressively. We will start with the neighbor country of Cameroon and then go further,” Gael adds.
Because of this, Gael says that the company plans to invest mainly in technology and hire more people for the next 5 years. “We plan to make our product robust and deploy it by next year. We want to improve the product to have something mature for the industry.”
The company also plans to provide analysis and diagnostic reports for other organs such as brain, breast and heart. It will do research with universities to have a better understanding of African disease. “So that is something important to us, not just providing insight but to increase the new pledge we have about local diseases and see how we can solve them with artificial Intelligence,” Gael explains. All these ambitions needs funding and Gael says that they will consider external sources of capital to join the organization. Gael says, “We have venture capitalists showing interest in our company in exchange for equity. We will think about that in the future. We will explore those opportunities and make the best decision for the company.”
This feature appeared in the June 2022 issue of Healthcare Middle East & Africa. You can read this and the entire magazine HERE
