Medical Tech Startup Envisionit Deep AI gets $1.65M
Envisionit Deep AI is now on the rise for growth, thanks to a $1.65 million investment from New GX Ventures SA, a partnership of New GX Capital, RMB Ventures, and GIIG Africa. This came after the firm was named the African Startup Awards’ Southern Africa regional winner. The firm offers a suite of products that […]
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Envisionit Deep AI is now on the rise for growth, thanks to a $1.65 million investment from New GX Ventures SA, a partnership of New GX Capital, RMB Ventures, and GIIG Africa. This came after the firm was named the African Startup Awards’ Southern Africa regional winner.
The firm offers a suite of products that it intends to expand beyond South Africa, including the Radify AI platform, which they claim provides quick, accurate, high-quality, and economical medical imaging diagnostics, all of which are crucial in disease detection and treatment.
Dr. Jaishree Naidoo was head of pediatric radiology at a South African hospital in 2014 when she had an insight after reading about the use of AI identification patterns in identifying animals in a news item.
Naidoo was already aware of pattern recognition as a radiologist with 20 years of expertise, and she could quickly understand how AI could be utilized in the business to improve access to diagnostic imaging.
The flame had been ignited, and in 2019, Naidoo co-founded Envisionit Deep AI with her husband, Terence Naidu, and Andrei Migatchev, a health-tech business that leverages AI to address the demand for diagnostic imaging.
According to Naidoo, the ultimate goal of Envisionit Deep AI is to alleviate pressures in the healthcare system, particularly in Africa, where infrastructural and human resource investments remain low.
Data demonstrate that the doctor-to-patient ratio in Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the lowest in the world, with specialized specialists faring considerably worse.
Human resources are so scarce in radiology that the radiologist-to-population ratio in Kenya, for example, is 1:389,255, while it is 1:566,000 in Nigeria.
This scarcity of radiologists inspired Naidoo to make Radify AI available to all, particularly in peri-urban and rural areas, and prompted the business to develop a hybrid solution.
The on-site solution of the startup can be linked with devices such as X-ray machines to provide diagnosis and therapy at the point of care. They also provide teleradiology services for patients who seek radiology reports.
The company began by developing models for reading chest X-rays, with the ability to detect 25 various pathologies, including tuberculosis, breast cancer, and pneumonia, Africa’s leading killer of children under the age of five.
This platform, according to Naidoo, was particularly useful during the Covid pandemic, when Envisionit Deep AI introduced a device that could detect Covid pneumonia from chest X-rays in less than 25 milliseconds.
This was used to improve productivity at a 700-bed hospital in South Africa’s Northern Cape area, which had only one radiologist. According to Naidoo, it was also utilized to triage patients in various ICUs, particularly during the pandemic’s second peak.
According to the business, while the volume of data it processes is important, it guarantees that its models are trained using quality de-identified data taken from varied ethnic groups around the world.
The data may also be checked by radiologists using a validation tool, which gives them some reassurance that the system is working properly and allows the business to enhance the precision of its models.
Envisionit Deep AI launched a new computer-assisted training model (an edtech tool) for medical practitioners interested in learning radiology.
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