Preeti Singh, Lead, Technical Program Manager, and Shravya Shetty, Distinguished Software Engineer, Google Research
Tuberculosis remains one of the world's deadliest infectious diseases, claiming an estimated 1.23 million lives each year. Despite decades of global investment, too many cases go undetected in the communities that carry the highest burden. Over the past five years, we’ve worked to change that trajectory, moving from early research benchmarks toward open foundation models that could be tuned and deployed at the point of care.
Getting access to timely healthcare often comes down to an accident of geography: where you live, what resources your local clinic possesses, and whether a specialist is within reach.
Nowhere is this disparity more acute than in the fight against tuberculosis (TB). Despite being preventable and curable, TB claims more than 1.23 million lives annually. A primary bottleneck is radiology: For those in high-burden settings, from people who live in remote rural areas to miners working deep underground, radiologists are scarce, and imaging infrastructure is often days away. As a result, millions of active cases go undetected, perpetuating transmission.
Source: Google Research Blog — Read the full article on the original site ↗