34: AI Against Global Diseases | Eduardo Peire, AI Scope

Website of AI Scope: https://aiscope.net/ Eduardo’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduardopeire/ And email: [email protected] Taking into account the current COVID pandemic, it is easy to oversee the persisting impact of other infectious diseases in the world. Nevertheless, malaria alone continues to take over half a million lives each year, along with other spreading diseases that need to be taken care of. Diagnosis, the first step of the cure, turns out to be very expensive and sometimes impossible to carry out in developing regions, especially in rural areas. Microscopic blood tests are expensive and there’s a clear lack of trained staff to perform analyses. Eduardo Peire, the Founder and the Head of Innovation at AI Scope, has found a brilliant application of AI to serve a higher purpose. He and his team are developing an app, powered by computer vision Deep Learning algorithms, that by connecting a phone to a microscope can automatically detect infectious diseases and confirm a need for further diagnostic. This allows to drastically reduce the cost and increase the scale at which diagnoses can be performed. However, the application does not exclude humans from the process and serves as a collaboration tool between the human and the machine. The algorithm is used to filter out people who certainly are not infected, to allow more resources and time to be allocated for people who really need it. Tune in with us in this discussion with Eduardo where he explains how the idea was born, how he gathered resources to power the non-profit project, and what humbling learnings he and his team have encountered on their way. ------------------- Looking for data-powered solutions for your business problems? We are here to help you with data cleaning, analytics, and machine learning: https://dataforfuture.org/services/