Google announces AI to identify doctor handwritings, partners Apollo Hospitals

Google on Monday announced enhancements to its healthcare initiatives, starting with introducing the ability for Google’s products to identify and understand medical prescriptions issued by doctors. The company also announced a partnership with the Apollo Hospitals chain, which will use Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) abilities to identify tuberculosis in X-ray results — and build other “medical tools” as well.

Manish Gupta, head of Google Research India, said in a media roundtable that the data set to build the ability to understand medicine names from prescriptions was built atop Google Lens’ existing ability to recognise text — “and used specific external sets of medical data to help build this capability”.

Gupta also added that Google is presently working on building additional capability for the company’s AI engines to be applied in additional medical fields. “Radiology is clearly an area of focus for us. But, on top of this, we are also working on other fields such as biopsies, which will seek to add a layer of technology on top of how specialists identify key health issues that can be exposed from biopsies,” he said.

To be sure, this is not a first of its kind initiative for Google in India. In July 2019, the company announced a pilot program with Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai and Sankara Eye Hospital in Chennai, under which the healthcare units used Google AI engines to examine retinal scans and identify traces of diabetes in them — a process formally known as diabetic retinopathy.

Google’s healthcare announcements came as part of the company’s Google for India 2022 conference, during which it announced Project Vaani, from which it would collect language data across 773 districts in the country. The company also highlighted a host of initiatives, which include a partnership with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity)’s document storing app, DigiLocker, to bring storage of government-issued documents locally on phones.

In a headlining discussion with Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, Google and Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai projected that AI “will have the most impact and touch every sector.”

“AI will have a big role in India’s tech story. Be it agriculture, the diversity of languages or making credit accessible at the bottom of the pyramid, there is an opportunity everywhere,” he added.