AI Diagnostics, a Cape Town-based med-tech company that has built an AI-powered stethoscope designed to detect tuberculosis, recently raised R85-million in a pre-series-A funding round.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Nkosinathi Ndlovu speaks to the company’s CEO, Braden van Breda, about the funding round and its mission to transform TB screening across Africa and Asia.
The round, led by the Steele Foundation for Hope, will fund the deployment of the Ostium – an AI-powered digital stethoscope that works in tandem with the company’s proprietary AI.TB model.
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The device is designed to detect signals associated with tuberculosis in lung sounds in real time, putting point-of-care diagnostic capabilities into the hands of the nurses, pharmacists and community health workers who often serve as the first contact in resource-constrained health systems.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Van Breda explains why AI Diagnostics chose to tackle one of the world’s most underfunded diseases, and how an AI model can pick up TB signals that escape even trained clinicians. He also unpacks the painstaking work of building a TB-positive lung-sound dataset from scratch.
Van Breda also delves into:
- How the Ostium compares to a traditional stethoscope;
- How the company handles real-world recording conditions, from noisy clinics to paediatric patients and HIV co-infection;
- How AI Diagnostics stops the model from silently degrading as the device moves from a Khayelitsha clinic to rural Zambia or Vietnam;
- The company’s goal of securing World Health Organisation certification and the path towards that;
- How the Ostium is positioned against – or alongside – AI-assisted chest X-ray tools such as CAD4TB and Qure.ai’s qXR; and
- What it would realistically take to put an Ostium in every primary healthcare clinic on the continent by 2030.
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