Qure.ai Helps Clinicians Answer Questions from COVID-19 Lung Scans

Qure.ai , a Mumbai-based startup, has been developing AI tools to detect signs of disease from lung scans since 2016. So when COVID-19 began spreading worldwide, the company raced to retool its solution to address clinicians’ urgent needs.
In use in more than two dozen countries, Qure.ai’s chest X-ray tool, qXR, was trained on 2.5 million scans to detect lung abnormalities — signs of tumors, tuberculosis and a host of other conditions.
As the first COVID-specific datasets were released by countries with early outbreaks — such as China, South Korea and Iran — the company quickly incorporated those scans, enabling qXR to mark areas of interest on a chest X-ray image and provide a COVID-19 risk score.
“Clinicians around the world are looking for tools to aid critical decisions around COVID-19 cases — decisions like when a patient should be admitted to the hospital, or be moved to the ICU, or be intubated,” said Chiranjiv Singh, chief commercial officer of Qure.ai. “Those clinical decisions are better made when they have objective data. And that’s what our AI tools can provide.”
While doctors have data like temperature readings and oxygen levels on hand, AI can help quantify the impact on a patient’s lungs — making it easier for clinicians to triage potential COVID-19 cases where there’s a shortage of testing kits, or compare multiple chest X-rays to track the progression of disease.
In recent weeks, the company deployed the COVID-19 version of its tool in around 50 sites around the world, including hospitals in the U.K., India, Italy and Mexico. Healthcare workers in Pakistan are using qXR in medical vans that actively track cases in the community.
A member of the NVIDIA Inception program, which provides resources to help startups scale faster, Qure.ai uses NVIDIA TITAN GPUs on premises, and V100 Tensor Core GPUs through Amazon Web Services for training and inference of its AI models. The startup is in the process of seeking FDA clearance for qXR, which has received the CE mark in Europe.
Capturing an Image of COVID-19
For coronavirus cases, chest X-rays are just one part of the picture — because not every case shows impact on the lungs. But due to the wide availability of X-ray machines, including portable bedside ones, they’ve quickly become the imaging modality of choice for hospitals admitting COVID-19 patients.
“Based on the literature to date, we know certain indicators of COVID-19 are visible in chest  X-rays. We’re seeing what’s called ground-glass opacities and consolidation, and noticed that the virus tends to settle in both sides of the lung,” Singh said. “Our AI model applies a positive score to these factors and relevant findings, and a negative score to findings like calcifications and pleural effusion that suggest it’s not COVID.”
The qXR tool provides clinicians with one of four COVID-19 risk scores: high, medium, low or none. Within a...