A major step forward has been taken to improve health in emerging and low-income markets through the collaboration of advanced microscope designer and manufacturer Motic China Group Co., Ltd and the Global Good Fund. The latter is a collaboration between Intellectual Ventures and Bill Gates for the development of technologies for a humanitarian impact.
The new collaboration of Global Food and Motic, a subsidiary of Motic (Xiamen) Electric Group Co Ltd, will create and distribute the EasyScan GO*, a breakthrough AI-powered microscope to fight the spread of drug-resistant malaria and assist in case management. The EasyScan GO utilizes custom image recognition software that identifies and counts malaria parasites in a blood smear in as little as 20 minutes. It is estimated that malaria kills approximately a half a million people annually with nearly half the world’s population at risk of contracting it.
“By distributing and commercializing an intelligent microscope, Global Good and Motic are creating a future where quality diagnosis of multiple diseases is within reach for everyone everywhere,” said Maurizio Vecchione, Intellectual Ventures’ Executive Vice President of Global Good and Research in a joint press release.
Accurate detection of severe and drug-resistant cases requires a WHO-certified expert microscopist to analyze a blood smear that takes about 20 minutes per slide. With a shortage of trained personnel in many emerging countries, the use of an intelligent microscope will automate the process, making up for this critical deficit. Global Good’s machine learning algorithm has shown to be as reliable as an expert microscopist for a disease that is one of the hardest to identify via a microscope slide.
The end result is an improvement in case management and standardizing detection across geographies and time. There is the added potential to more readily detect other diseases found in emerging markets.
