MSF: Diagnosing Antibiotic Resistance using AI

Doctors Without Borders’ new AI initiative

Here’s a news tip on a new project that we’re looking forward to learning and sharing more about via our meetup community’s Humanitarian AI Today podcast series: Doctors Without Borders’ use of artificial intelligence to help diagnose and combat antibiotic resistance.

You can learn more directly from Doctors Without Borders: https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/what-we-do/news-stories/news/diagnosing-antibiotic-resistance-through-artificial-intelligence

“MSF has been involved for several years in the fight against antibiotic resistance, in particular in countries in conflict where MSF treats war-wounded patients infected with multidrug-resistant bacteria.”

The project addresses a need and wish to “create a free and easy-to-use application and to develop new algorithms to efficiently process the image of an antibiotic susceptibility test on a smartphone.”

A recently published study in Nature outlines the project in detail. Here’s the abstract:

Antimicrobial resistance is a major global health threat and its development is promoted by antibiotic misuse. While disk diffusion antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST, also called antibiogram) is broadly used to test for antibiotic resistance in bacterial infections, it faces strong criticism because of inter-operator variability and the complexity of interpretative reading. Automatic reading systems address these issues, but are not always adapted or available to resource-limited settings. We present an artificial intelligence (AI)-based, offline smartphone application for antibiogram analysis. The application captures images with the phone’s camera, and the user is guided throughout the analysis on the same device by a user-friendly graphical interface. An embedded expert system validates the coherence of the antibiogram data and provides interpreted results. The fully automatic measurement procedure of our application’s reading system achieves an overall agreement of 90% on susceptibility categorization against a hospital-standard automatic system and 98% against manual measurement (gold standard), with reduced inter-operator variability. The application’s performance showed that the automatic reading of antibiotic resistance testing is entirely feasible on a smartphone. Moreover our application is suited for resource-limited settings, and therefore has the potential to significantly increase patients’ access to AST worldwide.

Doctor’s Without Borders is widely known across the humanitarian community as a sophisticated and highly professional organization with global reach and experience working across the most challenging operational contexts. If your interested in humanitarian applications of artificial intelligence, this is definitely a major one!