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MIDAS: a new platform for quality-graded health data for AI-enabled healthcare in India

Nature Medicine volume 30, pages 2704–2705 (2024)Cite this article

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India is actively promoting a digital health ecosystem to support its quest for universal healthcare. Quality-graded health data can provide exceptional decision-making support in this endeavor. The biggest hurdle to developing artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled healthcare technologies in India is the availability of high-quality annotated data for South Asians, especially Indians, that can be used to train and validate AI applications.

The large pool of multimodal data collected during patient treatment journeys or disease-specific surveillance provides unique archival opportunities for large medical datasets. Once annotated, medical images such as X-ray, computerized tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound, and whole-slide images acquired during an individual’s visit to healthcare institutions are a rich resource for training AI algorithms. Such endeavors include the Medical Imaging Databank of the Valencia Region, PathLAKE, The Cancer Imaging Archive1, and the Medical AI Data for All initiative2. Some of the existing medical imaging datasets from India are the IN-CXR (an open dataset of chest radiography for tuberculosis), the Indian Diabetic Retinopathy Image Dataset (IDRiD)3, Chákṣu (a glaucoma-specific fundus image database4), and CHAVI-RO (a comprehensive digital archive of cancer imaging from radiation oncology5). However, India has no centrally coordinated and discoverable repository for medical imaging data with established interoperable standards.

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Acknowledgements

Our work is supported by a research grant from the Indian Council of Medical Research, New Delhi (BMI/ICMR Image Bank, no. 19401-2022). We also thank the Department of Science and Technology, New Delhi, and the Government of Karnataka for support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

    Dibyajyoti Maity, Rajesh Sundaresan & Debnath Pal

  2. ARTPARK (AI & Robotics Technology Park) at IISc, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

    Rohit Satish, Dushyantsinh Anupsinh Jadeja, Raghu Dharmaraju & Vijay Chandru

  3. Indian Council of Medical Research, New Delhi, National Capital Territory of New Delhi, India

    Harpreet Singh

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Correspondence to Debnath Pal.

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Maity, D., Satish, R., Jadeja, D.A. et al. MIDAS: a new platform for quality-graded health data for AI-enabled healthcare in India. Nat Med 30, 2704–2705 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-03198-x

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