IIT-Mandi, US firm tie up for artificial intelligence

Tribune News Service

Mandi, August 19

IIT-Mandi has tied up with Rx-Data Science Inc, a leading healthcare manufacturer in the US, to create a portal documentation artificial intelligence and machine learning research in the pharmaceutical sector.

Official sources told The Tribune that an IIT-Mandi team was also planning to work closely with Rx-Data Science Inc to apply deep-learning methods and cognitive algorithms for discovering patterns among patient journeys and social ties among physicians. This is part of a long-term collaboration focused on performing machine-learning on healthcare data sets concerning patients and physicians and developing novel web-based visualisations.

Varun Dutt, Assistant Professor, School of Computing and Electrical Engineering, IIT Mandi, said, “Data sciences in India are at a very nascent stage, but in the United States, most healthcare and pharmaceutical companies have moved onto the consulting stage wherein live cases are debated online by doctors and medical practitioners’ community.”

He said India was at the helm of a healthcare boom given that the Government of India had hiked health spending by 11 

per cent with a gross budgetary allocation of Rs 1,200 crore for opening more hospitals.

“The state-of-the-art infrastructure on ground can help only when off-ground data science evolves and put the registers and medical charts online up for discussion with other doctors. IIT-Mandi is pleased to work with such a nodal agency in the healthcare sector the world-over and this puts India on the world map of healthcare mapping online,” he said.

Larry Pickett, Chief Executive Officer, Rx-Data Science Inc,  said, “The Rx-Data Science and IIT-Mandi research collaboration has been extremely productive in generating innovative new algorithms and visualisation tools using the latest machine learning approaches applied to longitudinal patient data.” 

“Both patients and our biopharma clients benefit from insights generated using novel approaches with cognitive and decision sciences applied to patient finding, patient journey and other complex use cases. We are excited to continue our long-term partnership with Dr Varun Dutt and the PhD and undergraduate students at IIT Mandi,” he added.