Notable innovations produced by Africans in 2017

Fredrick Ngugi December 23, 2017

Dr CADx

Dr CADx founder Gift Gana (l) receives the 2017 AI Medical Imaging Visionary Innovation Leadership Award. Photo credit: Dr CADx

Dr CADx, Zimbabwe

Dr. CADx is a unique medical screening system designed to help doctors analyze diagnostic images more accurately.  With the African continent still suffering from inadequate radiologists, most health facilities rely on general medical doctors to read medical images, exposing millions of patients to misdiagnosis.

But with Dr. CADx, which is the brainchild of a 34-year-old Zimbabwean, Gift Gana, diagnosing an illness is now as simple as uploading an image to Facebook. Using deep learning technology, this system recognizes patterns that characterize a disease in the diagnostic image, allowing the doctor to make the right diagnosis. Its latest prototype has an accuracy of about 82 percent, which is a major improvement from the previous 70 percent for most radiologists.

Last Edited by:Ismail Akwei Updated: December 23, 2017

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