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Towards the national initiative for health research data, ICMR and IISc, Bengaluru have collaborated and
launched a Centre for Health Data, supported by ARTPARK, to create and provision India's healthcare Gold
Standard Datasets.
Artificial Intelligence and Data Science led solutions have shown significant promise in improving access
to, and effectiveness of, Medical Imaging in screenings and diagnostics to assist healthcare professionals.
In India, there are quite a few early deployments of medical imaging AI-based screening solutions of
COVID-19, Tuberculosis, Breast Cancer, Diabetic Retinopathy, Peripheral Blood Smears (PBS) and more. These
deployments have eased the availability and access to the care to an extent. However, their on-ground
efficacy is yet to meet their promises.
At Centre for Health Data, we believe that a purpose-appropriate, modern, and standardised training and
validation datasets of the Indian population can bridge this efficacy gap. These datasets can also
subsequently unlock new discoveries to realise the potential of AI in medical imaging to improve clinical
efficacy and patient outcomes.
Project MIDAS is aimed at creating & provisioning 10 medical imaging gold standard datasets in its Phase 1,
while ensuring clinical, socio-economical, urban-rural, age, environmental and gender diversity (among other
potential diversity characteristics). these diligently collected and curated datasets of different medical
imaging modalities will be open-sourced.
This will boost the development, deployment and efficacy of medical imaging AI solutions that focus on
automatic disease screening, second opinion systems, and telemedicine programs.
Project MIDAS is aimed at capturing the true diversity of India's healthcare spectrum to accelerate medical
imaging AI research and innovation for inclusive Digital Health Programs in India.
Team
Prof. Debnath Pal
Debnath Pal is a professor at the Department of Computational and Data Sciences, Indian Institute of
Science, Bengaluru. He received a Bachelor's degree in 1993 from the University of Calcutta, Kolkata
and a Master's degree in 1995 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in Chemistry. He
obtained his Ph.D. degree from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, in the year 2000 for his research in
the area of structural bioinformatics under a fellowship from the Council for Scientific and
Industrial Research, New Delhi. He served two years as a Humboldt postdoctoral fellow in IMB-Jena,
Germany and another two years as a postgraduate researcher at the University of California, Los
Angeles, USA. His group at the Indian Institute of Science focuses on the development of methods and
algorithms in multi-scale biology using multi-modal approaches under the scope of systems biology.
He is interested in understanding biological function, disease, and drug discovery with an aim to
contribute to systems medicine.
More details:
http://cds.iisc.ac.in/faculty/dpal/
Dr. Harpreet Singh
Dr. Singh is a technical professional with 20+ years of experience in data management and analysis.
He is leading a team providing data analysis services to ICMR programs like ICMR Antimicrobial
Resistance Surveillance Network, implementation research in Mental Health etc. Further Dr. Singh has
extensive experience in handling and analysing next generation sequence data, genotyping by
sequencing and epitope prediction.
More details:
https://genomics.icmr.org.in/index.php/dr-harpreet-singh
Prof. Rajesh Sundaresan
Rajesh Sundaresan received the BTech Degree in Electronics and Communication from the Indian
Institute of Technology Madras and the MA and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Princeton
University. He then worked at Qualcomm Inc. on the design and development of wireless modems. He
joined IISc in 2005, where he is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Communication
Engineering and an associate faculty in the Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber-Physical Systems. He has
held visiting positions at Qualcomm Inc., the Coordinated Sciences Laboratory of the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Toulouse Mathematical Institute, Strand Life Sciences, and the
Indian Statistical Institute's Bengaluru Centre. His research interests include decision theory,
communication, computation, and control over networks, cyber-social systems, and, more recently,
data-driven decision frameworks for public health responses.
More details:
https://iisc.ac.in/about/administration/deans-of-divisions/
Prof. Chiranjib Bhattacharyaa
Chiranjib Bhattacharyya is currently Professor and the chair of the Department of Computer Science
and Automation, Indian Institute of Science. His research interests are in foundations of Machine
Learning, Optimisation and their applications to Industrial problems.
He has authored numerous papers in leading journals and conferences in Machine Learning. Some of his
results have won best paper awards.
He joined the Department of CSA, IISc, in 2002 as an Assistant Professor. Prior to joining the
Department he was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. He holds BE and ME degrees, both in
Electrical Engineering, from Jadavpur University and the Indian Institute of Science, respectively,
and completed his PhD from the Department of Computer Science and Automation, Indian Institute of
Science.
He is also a fellow of Indian Academy of Engineering.
For more information about his work please see
https://www.csa.iisc.ac.in/~chiru/
Dr. Vijay Chandru
Dr. Vijay Chandru is an academic and an entrepreneur. A technology pioneer of the World Economic
Forum since 2006, Chandru was recognized among the 50 pioneers of change by the India Today magazine
in 2008. Additionally, Chandru has mentored numerous entrepreneurs and early stage ventures in the
realms of education, technology and life sciences.
His academic career in decision sciences spanned over four decades at MIT, Purdue University and at
the Indian Institute of Science. His training in electrical engineering at BITS (Pilani) and
operational research at UCLA and MIT led him to explore academic research at the interface of
computational mathematics with geometry, logic, machine learning, biology and heritage art. A fellow
of both academies of science and engineering in India, he was a national distinguished technologist
of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, an adjunct professor in BioSystems Science and
Engineering and Executive Advisor to the new ART Park (AI and Robotics Tech Park) at the Indian
Institute of Science.
Dr. Chandru serves on the councils of Karnataka State Council of science and technology (KSCST) and
RGUKT in Andhra Pradesh. He chairs the governing council of the Digital University of Kerala. He is
a member of the vision groups for biotechnology (VGBT) as well as science and technology (VGST) in
Karnataka. As an author of the Atal Innovation Mission report in August 2015, and served briefly on
the mission high level committee of AIM as convened by the Prime Minister's Office at NITI Aayog.
At Strand Life Sciences, India's first example of academic entrepreneurship, Professor Chandru
served as founder executive chairman from inception in 2000 till 2018. The evolution of Strand from
data science to precision medicine reflected the progress in the field of molecular biology in the
two decades following the human genome project. Biospectrum Magazine named Professor Chandru the
Biotech Entrepreneur of 2007 in India. The Association of Biotech led Enterprises (ABLE), the apex
body of the biotech industry in India, elected Chandru as Honorary President for a three year term
2009-2012.
Chandru also co-founded the Simputer Trust which designed and manufactured India's first indigenous
handheld computers at the start of the millennium. Professor Chandru has also been actively engaged
in digital humanities since 2009 and is a founder trustee of the boutique International Institute
for Art, Culture and Democracy. His work at IIACD on digital capture and archiving of tangible and
intangible heritage artifacts has been largely funded by the Department at Science and Technology,
Government of India under the research program in Indian Digital Heritage.
Professor Chandru is deeply engaged with the idea of technology levers for bringing universal health
care to India. This manifests in his work as a Commissioner with the Lancet Citizens Commission for
reimagining India's health systems. Universal Health Care when extended to the seriously underserved
population of citizens afflicted with orphan and rare diseases has been a focus of his attention for
close to a decade now. The mission for "NO DISEASE ORPHAN" by 2030 has been actioned through his
founder engagements with the Centre for Health and Education Technologies (CHET) at IIACD as well as
in haemotological disorders with the open platform for orphan diseases at OPFORD Foundation.
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