Artificial Intelligence helping treat patients in refugee camps

The technology industry is abuzz with the potential of revolutionary technology of Artificial Intelligence and its sub-branches of Machine Learning and Deep Learning. There is an immense potential of AI technology to disrupt many industries with efficiency improvements, at the same time there are genuine concerns voiced by many industry stalwarts on the implications of this new technology to the society in general.

One important area where AI can be relevant is in triaging of patients in refugee camps where Doctors have a tremendous amount of workload in treating large number of people. To evaluate the possibility of using AI to improve the efficiency of Doctors in diagnosing patients we did a Free skin diagnosis camps for the Rohingya refugees.

Who are the Rohingya?
The Rohingyas are people who reside in Rakhine State, Myanmar (previously known as Burma). There were an estimated 1 million Rohingya living in Myanmar before the 2016–17 crisis. The humanitarian crisis have driven over 727,000 Rohingya refugees across the border into Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. These refugees live in makeshift camps and in subhuman conditions.
A picture of the Rohingya camp

UNICEF estimates that more than half the Rohingya refugees are children. The camps are so crowded that there’s no room to grow crops, but some of the Rohingya fish in nearby rivers. Each family receives bi-monthly rations of rice, lentils and cooking oil from the U.N. World Food Program.

How was the Study conducted?
A team of volunteers include Dermatologists, clinical nurses and administrative staff had setup a Free skin diagnosis camp in Leda BGB camp, Teknaf, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. This was a 2 day camp where patients with skin diseases were referred by other Doctors or were walk-in patients.

The patients were seen by the Dermatologist and a subset of the patients were triaged by a Nurse using Tibot and then presented to the Dermatologist for diagnosis. Once the Dermatologist had evaluated a prescription was given to the patient and free medicines were dispensed to them based on the Dermatologist care plan. Free Medicines given to patients based on Dermatologist’s prescription

One of the biggest challenges is the large number of patients that need help especially this camp since it has one of the largest number of refugees in the world.

What is Tibot?
Tibot is an app which diagnoses common skin problems using AI and deep learning technology. It provides an instant diagnosis of the top 3 probable conditions along with a confidence measure. Tibot has an online symptom checker (https://tibot.ai/symptom-checker/) which is freely available to diagnose skin problems.

What were the results?
During the 2 days dermatology camp, the team had seen severe cases of skin conditions which are related to lack of general hygienic and sanitary living conditions. It was interestingly observed, that no patients came because of cosmetic conditions like Acne or Skin pigmentation issues.

A total of 498 patients were seen by 2 Dermatologist during the 2 days. On the first day, the clinic was setup for 10 hours and on the second day, the clinic was for 8 hours.

It was observed that using AI to triage patients and give that input to the Dermatologists improved their efficiency in seeing more patients by 25%.

Tibot (www.tibot.ai) is a software application available in multiple formats like chatbot, mobile app etc which uses Artificial Intelligence to predict the probable skin condition of a user. The goal of Tibot is to raise awareness about Skin conditions which users have so that they would seek medical advice for proper treatment.

Polyfins Technology Inc
Address: 39180 Liberty St, #101 Fremont, CA 94538, USA
Contact Name: Faisal Basar
Contact Phone: 678-756-2665

This release was published on openPR.