A Conversation with the Founders of SigTuple — AI Based Diagnostic Platform
As part of Endiya’s Inside Out Video Series, we spoke to the founders of SigTuple, an AI-based medical diagnostics start-up that has a vision to revolutionize this space through data driven intelligence. SigTuple’s solutions digitize blood smear and other samples, and then use its AI engine to classify and tag various elements in the images. Their core product Manthana is a continuous learning platform that is used to churn data to generate intelligence, and also integrates the capabilities and workflows of SigTuple.
As Dr. Ramesh, MD Endiya Partners, spoke to SigTuple founders Rohit Kumar Pandey and Apurv Anand, the conversation led to a deep dive into the technology behind their products, the role of AI based diagnostics in future and the validations required for adopting these solutions by the healthcare community.
Introducing SigTuple — AI based Diagnostic Platform
The conversation began by focusing on Shonit™, SigTuple’s complete blood smear analyser solution. It uses a smart scanner to digitize the peripheral blood smear slides, based on which the AI algorithms analyse the digital data and generate a report on the cloud. This report can then be reviewed by a pathologist remotely based on which a diagnosis can be made.
In addition to improving speed and accuracy of the medical diagnosis, the solution enables patients located in Tier II or Tier III cities to get their report analysed by a pathologist in a Tier 1 city. This is a significant advantage for a country like India where qualified medical practitioners may not even be available in remote areas.
Power of AI based Diagnostic Solutions in Future
Given that we are witnessing tremendous advancement in AI and machine learning based healthcare solutions, medical diagnostics is a space that can benefit a greatly by simplifying the arduous task of going through large amounts of data to generate a report. By automating the reports for routine tests like CBC, AI and deep learning can help pathologists do their job more efficiently and eliminate human fatigue driven errors.
The next part of the conversation threw light on how SigTuple expects the roles of healthcare practitioners to evolve as they adopt these solutions in the diagnosis process, and move up the value chain, taking care of more involved aspects that require human intervention and a final diagnosis.
Validating the SigTuple Solutions
In a vertical like Healthcare, trust is as extremely important factor and becomes even more so when it comes to the adoption of AI based algorithms and solutions. While regulations continue to evolve to include the new AI and Digital Health products, this episode explains the clear validations that SigTuple has in place in order to gain that level of trust and comfort required.
In addition to the established statistical validations, the platform provides healthcare practitioners with visual backing of all classifications and metrics that are mentioned in the report. Any metric can be linked to set of images that were analysed to arrive at that value. This comprehensive report gives further confidence in the results and analysis done by the automated solution, and makes the entire process as transparent as possible.
With feats like being selected as part of NetApp Excellerator’s 2nd Cohort and by NVidia as one of the top 5 social impact AI startups in the world, SigTuple’s journey has been nothing short of exciting.
As an early investor in SigTuple, Endiya Partners continues to work closely with the team to build revolutionary healthcare products.
