Quality healthcare is a very rare experience in Ghana and other African countries. According to IFC, healthcare in Sub-Saharan Africa remains the worst in the world, with few countries able to spend the $34 to $40 a year per person that the World Health Organization considers the minimum for basic healthcare.
Mustapha Zaidan, a young technology entrepreneur, is committed to ensuring that the quality of health care in Africa is improved with artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“I have devoted my life to advocating for digital healthcare in Africa. I’m a visionary who believes in changing the health industry in Africa with artificial intelligence and machine learning,” he told Kuulpeeps.
Mustapha is the CEO and founder of Abbey AI, an AI-powered medical imaging diagnostics system for chest X-ray interpretation. Abbey AI is able to detect fourteen Chest X-ray pathologies on a chest X-ray.
“The idea came from reading an online article from the World Health Organization stating that two-thirds of the world population lack access to radiologist diagnostics and also finding out that over 14 African countries don’t have radiologist at all,” he said.
Revealing why he named his company “Abbey”, Mustapha said: “Abbey means a monastery building occupied by monks and these building has never seen no innovations before same with the Radiology space. Abbey in our terms means to disrupt”
Mustapha indicated that the system has been trained and validated from over 112,114 large public dataset images. “The bounding box annotation and disease labelling for our private dataset has been performed by several radiologist and clinicians.”
He went on to state that the Abbey AI system has been able to outperform the human radiologist on metrics like accuracy, specificity and sensitivity. “We have a system accuracy of over 90%,” he said.
Mustapha is convinced that Abbey AI is the solution to imaging medical diagnostics in Ghana and Africa because it is going to close the gap between radiologist-patient ratio.
“In our case in Ghana, we have about 76 radiologists in the country serving over 30 million population, most of them in Accra and Kumasi. In the northern part of the country, there are only 3 radiologists serving the entire population. The only way we can solve this is to adopt AI and Machine learning technology,” he said.
“We currently have 3 Hospitals using our AI radiology system for pilot testing,” he added.
He believes that in the next five years, his company will expand its services throughout Sub Saharan African also develop additional AI models for diagnosing Chest CT scans, Mammograms and Brain CT.
Aside from Abbey AI, Mustapha Zaidan has also worked on other digital projects, one of which is Obaatanpa, a mobile application that gives real-time information to both pregnant women and nursing mother’s on whatever is happening to them during pregnancy and nursing. The app comes with a menstrual tracker which enables women to know their due date and their free periods.
In 2019, Mustapha’s team developed an app, known as FastRx, which connects patients with pharmacies where they can have medication delivered to them at home.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Mustapha and his team also developed a COVID-19 self-checker chatbot app that enables individuals to quickly determine if they may have the virus.
source: kuulpeeps.com
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