Aster DM Healthcare, Intel, CARPL form learning-based health data platform

A single patient generates nearly 80 MB of data annually in imaging and EMR data; according to 2017 estimates, RBC Capital Market projects that "by 2025, the compound annual growth rate of data for healthcare will reach 36%. Genomic data alone is predicted to be 2–40 exabytes by 2025—eclipsing the amount of data acquired by all other technological platforms."

AI-enabled solutions in areas such as medical imaging are helping to address pressing challenges in healthcare such as staffing shortages and aging populations. However, accessing silos of relevant data spread across the different hospitals, geographies, and other health systems while complying with regulatory policies is a massive challenge.

Commenting on this first-of-its-kind collaboration, Dr Azad Moopen, Founder, Chairman and Managing Director of Aster DM Healthcare, said, "Aster Innovation and Research Centre is glad to partner with technology giants like CARPL and INTEL to bring highly progressive healthcare solutions through digital advances and Artificial Intelligence. The Secure Federated Learning initiative will help analyse data and support the development of a predictive mechanism for patients, the opportunity for a second opinion on treatments, and most importantly, affirming data security and confidentiality of patients. So far, only a few such initiatives have been conducted especially in the healthcare space. This collaborative platform with world leaders will open doors to many players in the sector to participate in developing accessible healthcare solutions."

Nivruti Rai, Country Head, Intel India & Vice President, Intel Foundry Services, said, "AI applications are at the cusp of revolutionizing healthcare through timely and effective screening, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Getting access to high quality training datasets and addressing limitations in the form of regulatory frameworks and geographic boundaries are critical imperatives. I am happy to announce that Aster and Intel have collaborated to address these challenges and deployed a first-of-its-kind Secure Federated Learning Platform in India. It offers a real-world solution by addressing key aspects like security, trust and confidentiality for optimal use of data. This solution will be offered as a service to be used by both AI researchers and data custodians in their pursuit of advancing AI innovation and extensive impact in healthcare. It marks a paradigm shift by getting the compute to the data rather than getting the data to the compute. Our joint intent is to make this platform available to the health ecosystem to solve some of the large-scale healthcare problems and enable quality, affordable and at-scale healthcare."

Dr. Vidur Mahajan, Chief Executive Officer, CARPL.ai said, "There is no doubt that de-centralised data storage and subsequent training of AI models in a federated manner is the future, especially since lack of generalisability of AI is becoming a bigger problem. We are glad to partner with brands that are doyens of their respective fields - Aster in healthcare and Intel in computation - to enable the extraction, anonymisation, annotation and delivery of data to the AI models through CARPL. Our mission is to take AI from bench to clinic, and this is another example of the same."