Patna: In a novel and path-breaking initiative, IIT Patna Engaged in developing ‘virtual doctor’ to assist medical practitioners and facilitate early access diagnosis No disease.
The ‘virtual doctor’, when fully developed, will serve as a disease diagnosis assistant (diagnosis chatbot), thoroughly examining symptoms and preparing diagnostic reports for doctors. Besides, it will also serve as the first point of contact for sick people in remote areas where access to doctors is difficult.
This unique, people-friendly research has been pioneered by IIT Patna scholar Abhishek Tiwari, who has been awarded the highly prestigious Prime Minister’s Award. Research Fellowship for the project. Sriparna Saha, Associate Professor, IIT Patna, Professor, IIT Mumbai Pushpak Bhattacharya And senior doctor Meenakshi Dhar of AIIMS Rishikesh is collaborating with him on this project.
Explaining this user-friendly technique, Tiwari said that artificial intelligence-based clinical decision support is gaining ever-increasing popularity in both the research and industry communities. One such manifestation is automated disease diagnosis, which aims to assist clinicians in symptom detection and disease diagnosis. “We are building a novel end-to-end multimodal disease diagnosis virtual assistant (MDD-VA) using reinforcement learning techniques. The proposed MDD-VA will outperform multiple uni-modal baselines in both automated and human evaluation”, he said.
He claimed that the present work is the first attempt to propose and construct a multimodal disease diagnosis system. He pointed out that WHO estimates that, despite an increase in 40 million health-sector jobs, there will be a healthcare workforce shortage of more than 14.5 million by 2030. Additionally, the Kovid-19 pandemic has adversely affected universal health coverage in recent years.
Hence, this virtual doctor will prove to be a boon for people in developing countries, he said. He pointed out that Dr. Dhar is providing guidelines for expected behavior of AI-based junior doctors and continuously checking ongoing progress.
Researchers and doctors have been working on the project since last year, and they expect it to be ready for final screening and deployment by 2024, he said. Saha said the virtual doctor (Dr V) will help remote populations access better healthcare services, including early diagnosis. Successful completion of the project will promote major advancements in the field of telemedicine.
She pointed out that in our country, the number of doctors is much less than the actual requirement. Besides, our government hospitals are constantly overcrowded with patients. Hence, this app will help the doctors to save time and diagnose the patient effectively.
