Tag: diagnostic

Global Launch of COVIRAP – Nucleic acid-based Point-of-Care Diagnostic Device for COVID-19 and beyond

Highlights

  • A generic step-wise isothermal nucleic acid-based testing technology for the rapid diagnostics of pathogenic infections including but not limited to SARS-CoV-2 in individuals.

  • Nasal Swab/ Saliva to result from integration in about 45 minutes in a highly affordable pre-programmable portable device developed by the team, without requiring any separate facility for RNA extraction.

  • Kit supplemented with a free smartphone app to facilitate unambiguous results interpretation and automated dissemination to the patients. The test may be performed by unskilled personnel outside the controlled lab with no intermediate manual intervention between sample loading and result dissemination.

  • Patents filed in the India, USA, several other countries, and the foreign filing license has been granted recently.

  • The unique trade-off between the high scientific standards of advanced molecular diagnostics with the elegance of common rapid tests for underserved community care.

IIT Kharagpur has successfully commercialized its flagship healthcare product – COVIRAP – the novel diagnostic technology for infectious diseases including COVID-19 and beyond. The product developed by lead researchers Professor Suman Chakraborty, Dr. Arindam Mondal and their research group has been licensed for commercialization to the Rapid Diagnostic Group of Companies, India and Bramerton Holdings LLC, USA. 

Bramerton Holdings has signed a record deal for securing global rights for commercially disseminating the COVIRAP technology developed at IIT Kharagpur in various geographical locations outside the territory of the Indian subcontinent.  Rapid Diagnostic has also initiated adapting the COVIRAP technology platform for COVID-19 and tuberculosis, in collaboration with IIT Kharagpur.

The research team has now developed a more advanced version of COVIRAP using a step-wise isothermal nucleic acid testing technology for the rapid diagnostics of pathogenic infections including SARS-CoV-2 in individuals. The COVID-19 diagnostic test can be conducted directly from human swab samples in the portable device developed by the team, without requiring any separate facility for RNA extraction. The results can be made available within 45 minutes of obtaining the patient sample. The kit has also been also supplemented with a free smartphone app to facilitate unambiguous results interpretation and automated dissemination to the patients. 

Recognizing the impact of the COVIRAP technology in meeting the long-standing demands of high-quality community-level testing, IIT Kharagpur has further initiated the procedure of deploying this product for on-campus use to detect possible novel coronavirus infection.

“The above move has taken place at a critical juncture when the recent spurt in COVID-19 infection, commonly known as the second wave, has been threatening to spread more rapidly than ever before. Moreover, the commercialization of COVIRAP will initiate complete indigenization and availability of a large range of affordable healthcare products in the Indian market as well as deep trenches of a large global market that is literally starving for the need of such technology. COVIRAP promises its reach to the grass-root level in catering to the needs of the last person of the society,” opined Director Prof. V K Tewari.

For use of the test, the nasal, as well as oral swab samples, are diluted in a solution and tested in the portable device by mixing with reagents that are supplied in a pre-mixed form. The test runs automatically in the device without intermediate manual intervention.

“We have conducted field trials for running the tests with the help of unskilled personnel outside controlled laboratory ambiance, with no compromise in quality of the test outcome. The entire sample-to-result procedure may be conducted in the portable device, virtually anywhere and with minimal training thus making the process of testing more effective for community-level screening and early detection of any emerging infection outbreak. This may act as a key to arrest community level spreading of the infection,” remarked Prof. Suman Chakraborty.

Nucleic acid-based point-of-care tests such as COVIRAP usher great promises as viable alternatives for rapid testing of pathogenic infections at low cost in resource-limited settings.

“The COVIRAP test overcomes several potential bottlenecks faced by similar other tests in the past, for instance, poor performance outside highly controlled laboratory and lack of simple, affordable, yet generic and universal instrument that may be used for home-based testing and community healthcare for a wide variety of infectious and non-infectious diseases,” he explained.

Patents centered around this innovation have been filed in the India, USA, several other countries, in the name of IIT Kharagpur. The foreign filing license has been granted recently. Commercialization and use in the USA and Europe under the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) process are currently underway. Both the Rapid Diagnostic Group in India and Bramerton Holdings in the USA, in association with IIT Kharagpur, have already identified the key resources towards establishing the reagent supply chain, kit and device manufacturing in entirety under a ‘Make in India’ initiative with complete import substitution. In addition to licensing COVIRAP to these companies, the inventors at IIT Kharagpur will receive further support via industrial consultancy project mode for further advancement of the product. 

The envisaged trade-off between the high scientific standards of advanced molecular diagnostics with the elegance of common rapid tests appears to be the future of infectious disease detection and management. A platform technology capable to be inclusive of all such disease detections where nucleic acid-based tests may be deployed, COVIRAP is not just a one-time solution targeted specifically to COVID-19 but will remain imperative in global disease management overall years to come.

For more information contact:

Research & Product: Prof. Suman Chakraborty, suman@mech.iitkgp.ac.in; Media: media@iitkgp.ac.in; VeenaNxt: info@VeenaNxt.com

Follow IIT Kharagpur on Facebook/Twitter: @IITKgp     Instagram: @iit.kgp

About IIT Kharagpur: Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur is a higher educational institute known globally for its graduate output and affordable technology innovations. Set up in 1951 in a detention camp as an Institute of National Importance, the Institute is ranked among the top five in India and has been awarded Institute of Eminence by the Govt. of India in 2019. The key areas of research of IIT Kharagpur are Affordable Healthcare Technologies, Advanced Manufacturing, Advanced Transportation, Precision Agriculture and Food Technology, Cyberphysical Systems, Ecology & Environment, Mining, Water Resources and Architecture. The Institute is engaged in several international and national mission projects and ranks significantly in research output including 50-100 IPR filed annually and about 2000 research publications in top journals and conferences. At present, the Institute has about 750 full-time equivalent faculty members, more than 14000 students and over 70000 Alumni. For more information visit: www.iitkgp.ac.in

About COVIRAP Commercial Partners:

Rapid Diagnostic Group of Companies: Founded by Dr. Bharat Jindal, a medical doctor by profession, the companies were established in 1995 with the sole aim of providing quality and leading-edge products and services to the Indian Healthcare ecosystem. By now, they have established an extensive national network of 22 offices and 4,000 distributors, enabling outreach to customers at under-resourced locations where the infrastructure of high-end diagnostic tests remains non-existent. In response to the pandemic situation, they came into the production of COVID IgG ELISA kits with a joint venture of ICMR/NIV, Rapid tests, PPE kits, Masks and few more products which can help the Nation. Boosted by their own manufacturing facility of diagnostic tests based in Delhi, they envision bringing the COVIRAP technology to the Indian Market at the earliest. As a pioneer in the industry, their mission is to provide timely, high-quality diagnostic kits, diagnostic instruments, point of care and critical care instruments at an affordable price. They have also initiated adapting the COVIRAP technology platform for TB diagnostics, in collaboration with IIT Kharagpur.

Bramerton Holdings: Bramerton Holdings is a subsidiary of Riverfort Global Capital (ww.riverfort.com). The Riverfort Group comprises a London-based investment advisor regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority and a number of regulated investment funds and investment companies. In addition, the Riverfort group is an investor in the Sure Vally Ventures (SVV) venture capital fund which invests in early-stage technology companies and includes both private sector and governmental investors. The Riverfort Group and its founders have arranged and advised the funding of over 100 companies deploying over 500 million USD in capital. Bramerton Holdings is launching the special purpose vehicle for the global development and distribution of the COVIRAP technology via its subsidiary called VeenaNxt Limited. [Contact at info@VeenaNxt.com]

The  Bramerton Holdings leadership team includes Chairman Brian Kinane,  (MBA London & Columbia Business Schools) and BA (Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin) having more than 12 years investment fund management experience and 15 years entrepreneurial, corporate & operational experience across global technology giants; Gytis Martinkus, Managing Director & CFO, an experienced financial professional having qualified long-term association with the KPMG;  Subhendu K Misra, Managing Director US Markets, MBA (Columbia Business School, USA) and BS and MS (in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA), having over 20 years of experience at the intersection of life sciences, technology, and innovation, involving the top global pharmaceutical and medical devices companies across the US, Europe, and Japan; and  Mark Wheeler, Chief Legal Officer, a qualified practicing solicitor holding, by training LLB in law (University of Bristol) and LPC (University of Law, Guildford branch), having over 10 years of  experience as a qualified solicitor, and named as a key individual in small cap capital markets and up to £ 50m mergers and acquisitions transactions in the Legal 500, 2020 edition.The VeenaNxt Limited board of directors includes Richard Morgan and Peter Bains as a strategic advisor. Richard Morgan is on the VeenaNxt board of directors. Richard co-founded Celgene in 1987 and was on the board for 20 years, serving as Chairman and CEO before recruiting a new CEO.  He remained on the board for a further 10 years, serving on the Executive Committee and chairing the Compensation Committee until his retirement in 2008.  He was the Chairman of Quidel Corp, a NASDAQ listed company, and Polarean. Richard was also a Managing Partner at Wolfensohn Partners LP which followed 15 years at Schroders plc, then a leading British merchant bank. In 1982 he completed the Advanced Management Program at the Harvard Business School. Peter Bains is a strategic advisor to VeenaNxt. Peter is currently CBO and Executive Director of Mina Therapeutics, a privately held UK biotech company as well as Non Executive Director of Mereo BioPharma Group plc, a NASDAQ listed company and Indivior, a FTSE listed company. Peter was the Chief Executive Officer of Syngene International, which he successfully took public on the Mumbai Exchanges in 2015. Peter has over three decades of experience in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry, which included a 23-year career at GlaxoSmithKline, among other roles he was also a member of various GSK teams with strategic, operations, marketing, and business development responsibilities and a Member of the Board of Directors of GSK India.  He also served as the Representative Executive Officer and Chief Executive Officer of Sosei Group Corporation, a Tokyo listed biotech company. Their team profile for the exclusive launch of COVIRAP in the global market is boosted further by executive scientist Dr. Gopal Pattanayak, Staff Scientist at the University of Chicago in the life sciences space, as well as Dr. Ajaya K. Mohanty, an internationally recognized technology professional having played a leading role in developing private and public sector partnerships in scientific research, education and IT, and having advised and consulted on the National Supercomputing Mission and (Digital) Infrastructure in India and recipient of  an award bestowed by the President of India in 2017.

New AI Diagnostics for Lung Diseases

AI and IoT based Diagnostic Device for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases developed by IIT Kharagpur

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a common chronic respiratory disease caused by exposure to harmful gases and particulate matters, with a high health burden on the country’s healthcare services and society. For long, the medical community has been depending on patient history and clinical symptoms for disease diagnosis, which often prevents early detection of the disease and advancing of the disease adds to the medical bill through frequent hospitalizations. 

Researchers at IIT Kharagpur have developed an affordable diagnostic intervention for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease based on the internet-of-things medical devices (IoT-MD) integrated with AI. [Download Journal Paper]

At the Organic Electronics Laboratory (ORELA), Department of Physics, IIT Kharagpur, Prof. Dipak Kumar Goswami and his research team have developed SenFlex.T, a smart mask synced with an android monitoring app through Bluetooth, that can continuously monitor breathing patterns, rate, heart rate, oxygen saturation level in blood. The app is connected to a cloud computing server, where artificial intelligence (AI) has been implemented to predict the severity of COPD through machine learning (ML). 

“SenFlex.T can be used at home by patients without having to visit diagnostic centres as against the current practice. This will also address the critical issue of addressing COPD at an early stage and by means of advanced healthcare technology, a boon for both patients and the overall healthcare system,” explained Prof. Goswami. 

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease has been a top cause of death, second to only deaths due to heart diseases. In 2017 it claimed about 1 million lives in India. In October 2019, health experts, at a medical convention, confirmed that COPD claims more lives than AIDS, TB, Malaria, Diabetes all put together. The threat from COPD has become more acute under the COVID situation, with increased comorbidity rates. A recent survey confirmed that the severity and mortality rates among COPD patients to be affected by the COVID-19 virus are over 63%. Moreover, the patients affected in the COVID-19 virus, which is right now over 4 million people in India and 27 million in the world, are more susceptible to build up various lung disorder-related diseases like COPD, Asthma etc. 

“It was crucial for health-tech researchers to develop a diagnostic intervention for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. Spirometry, the gold standard test to diagnose obstructive airway diseases like asthma and COPD, is often avoided due to the unavailability of the equipment, difficulty in data interpretation and the cost of the tests. This challenge and the criticality strongly motivated us to develop an AI-based system, that can overcome the problem of interpreting the results and be accessible not only for the doctors but also for the patients,” said Prof. Goswami. 

SenFlex.T smart mask contains a highly sensitive, flexible temperature sensor along with a Bluetooth based measuring electronics. The sensor system can continuously monitor the temperature changes of inhaled and exhaled air during breathing and record the breathing pattern. The temperature sensor has a resolution of 4.3 mK and about 25 ms response time. Further, a commercially available pulse oximeter has been integrated with the sensor system to monitor the oxygen saturation level during breathing.

The patient data is uploaded automatically to the cloud server through the mobile app (SenFlex), where it is processed by means of AIML, and reports made available on the app and for doctors’ consultation. 

The innovation has been reported in the international journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces [Download Paper]. The researchers have also filed a patent for the innovation and are ready for commercialization. The product cost has been estimated at about ₹ 2,500/-.

Cite Paper:  ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2019, 11, 4, 4193–4202
Publication Date:December 31, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1021/acsami.8b19051

Media Coverage:

Project Information: Prof. Dipak Goswami, dipak@phy.iitkgp.ac.in; 

Institute Information: Prof. B N Singh, Registrar, registrar@hijli.iitkgp.ac.in;

Media Outreach: Shreyoshi Ghosh, shreyoshi@adm.iitkgp.ac.in

Follow us on: Twitter – @IITKgp  Instagram – @iit.kgp   Facebook – @IIT.Kgp

IIT Kharagpur Researchers Develop Novel Technology for COVID-19 Rapid Test

The entire rapid test can be conducted in an ultra-low-cost portable device with the test results available in a customized smartphone application for dissemination within 1 hour without requiring manual interpretation. All of this at a cost of around ₹ 400/- per test.

Photo: Arnab Moitra, Graphics: Suman Sutradhar

In a unique effort, researchers at IIT Kharagpur have innovated a novel portable rapid diagnostic device to detect COVID-19 infection. This first-of-its-kind device will bring the testing for COVID-19 out from the walls of expensive laboratories and RT-PCR machines and enable testing at affordable costs for the under-served community across the world.

This entire test with the extracted RNA from the patient saliva samples can be conducted in an ultra-low-cost portable enclosure as an alternative to specialized laboratory equipment. The same portable unit can be used for a large number of tests, on mere replacement of the paper cartridge after each test. The device has been proven to produce no false result with remarkable accuracy and sensitivity compatible to standard RT-PCR tests. This test has an unprecedented low cost of less than ₹ 400/- per test, taking all components of expenses and business model into account.

Considering the impending outbreak of COVID-19 infection at progressively more geographical locations with the anticipated increment in number of affected personnel at a dramatic rate, there is an emergent need to run large numbers of reliable diagnostic tests at affordable cost and minimal infrastructural support, for monitoring the early stages of progression of the disease when many of the infected persons do not exhibit discernible symptoms of infection. 

However, the testing technologies currently under use are highly expensive, despite the innovations in low-cost testing kits as the actual testing machinery cost remains high. Further testing mechanism has logistical issues due to the infrastructural requirement of the testing centres. A team of researchers from IIT Kharagpur, contemplating on the challenge, realized the alternative cannot be new innovations for the existing detection systems such as testing kits and PCR machines but a disruptive approach leading to a new technology and testing process being innovated without sacrificing the scientific rigor and medically acceptable high standards of the test results. 

Prof. Suman Chakraborty (L), Prof. Arindam Mondal (R)

Prof. Suman Chakraborty from the Mechanical Engineering Department, IIT Kharagpur, and Dr. Arindam Mondal from the School of Bio Science, IIT Kharagpur, came up with the concept of a portable non-invasive rapid detection test for COVID-19 thus taking the testing mechanism to a whole new level. The technology essentially deploys a disposable simple paper-strip for chemical analysis and visualization of results. 

The device is capable of conducting the detection of the viral genomic RNA in an ultra-low-cost portable enclosure as an alternative to a highly expensive RT-PCR machine. The same portable unit can be used for a large number of tests, on mere replacement of the paper cartridge after each test. The new device has been designed to be usable at locations with extremely poor resources in an uncontrolled environment, catering the needs of the underserved population. Moreover, it can be operated by minimally trained personnel, precluding the needs for skilled technicians. 

The research team has successfully validated the detection procedure, taking time of approximately 60 minutes to run each test. This obviates the need of an expensive PCR machine, by means of a set of innovations such as a portable automated pre-programmable temperature control unit for the genomic analysis, coupled with a specially functionalized detection unit on a simple strip of paper, and a customized smartphone application for dissemination of test results without requiring manual interpretation. While the Institute can produce the testing kit up to a certain scale, patent licensing will facilitate commercialization opportunities for medical technology companies.

Under the guidance of the Professors, the device design and fabrication work has been spearheaded by doctoral student Mr. Sujay Kumar Biswas, and the bio-analytical protocol has been standardized by doctoral students Mr. Saptarshi Banerjee and Ms. Nandita Kedia. Dr. Aditya Bandopahyay has further helped in developing the thermal unit. 

Highlighting the need for such equipment, Prof. Suman Chakraborty, Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Kharagpur, said, “In assessing the utility of a specific method of disease detection, there is a common failure to recognize that the cost of the test kit may not turn out to be the most critical factor from the viewpoint of affordable diagnosis, unlike what is being commonly portrayed. Rather, the greater challenge is complete elimination of the need for any specialized infrastructure and ensuring the possibility of conducting tests at large scale at low cost without compromised accuracy. In that light, the RT-PCR based tests suffer from a compelling constraint of requiring an elaborate laboratory-infrastructure and support system including the operational and maintenance cost, to perform the test. The alternative existing approaches to these tests, on the other hand, are either invasive (blood tests) and non-indicative of early stage of development of the infection, or dependent on reagents that are extremely unstable and cannot be implemented in resource-limited settings.” 

The equipment developed by IIT Kharagpur Researchers will cost about ₹ 2,000 if a pilot facility is used. Use of a large-scale commercial facility will further reduce with increase in the production scale. This compares very favourably with the RT PCR machine costing ₹ 15 Lakh.

Further, Dr. Arindam Mondal, Assistant Professor, School of Bio Science, IIT Kharagpur, added, “The unique portable device developed by the IIT Kharagpur researchers has not only been validated for the diagnostics of COVID-19, but also been designed to be capable of detecting any other kind of RNA virus by following the same generic procedure. The impact of this, therefore, is long lasting, empowered by the capability of detecting unforeseen viral pandemics in the coming years that may potentially endanger human lives time and again.”  

The results from this new technology have been strictly validated by following all established laboratory controls against the benchmarked results obtained from RT-PCR machine, using synthetic viral RNA. The synthetic RNA is exactly the same replicate of the viral RNA extracted from infected patients, as per accepted scientific benchmarking procedure, and is used for validating laboratory tests to avoid undue contamination and danger due to spreading of infection while handling sensitive body-fluid samples

Prof. Suman Chakraborty (L), Prof. V K Tewari, Director (Right)

The project received financial support from the Institute in late April as Prof. V K Tewari, Director, IIT Kharagpur, decided to set up a fund to support COVID-19 related research and product development. 

“This unique innovation is aligned with the Institutional vision to develop high-end healthcare technologies that can be afforded by the ailing common people all around the globe at virtually no cost, and is likely to make significant breakthrough in global viral pandemic management”, opined Director Prof. V K Tewari.

The Ministry of Human Resources Development, Govt. of India has also been reaching out to all technical institutions regarding ongoing research work to help address India’s increasing need to augment testing facilities.

IIT Kharagpur is ready for commercialization of the product. Any corporate or start-up can approach the Institute for technology licensing and commercial scale of production. The Institute is open to tie-ups, including a mode where the government intervenes with regards to meeting our low-cost healthcare objective for the under-served community as a policy measure to protect the interest of public health amidst the pandemic situation, instead of merely developing a strong profit-oriented model.

Contacts: 

Project Information: Prof. Suman Chakraborty, suman@mech.iitkgp.ac.in; Prof. Arindam Mondal, arindam.mondal@iitkgp.ac.in

Institute Related: Prof. B N Singh, registrar@hijli.iitkgp.ac.in; Media Outreach: Shreyoshi Ghosh, shreyoshi@adm.iitkgp.ac.in

For more information visit: iitkgp.ac.in. More News: https://kgpchronicle.iitkgp.ac.in/ 

Follow IIT Kharagpur on Social Media: Facebook: @IIT.Kgp; Twitter: @IITKgp; Instagram: @iit.kgp

Pandemic Healthcare Technologies Underway @IITKGP

Economic Times          Times of India            Times of India (PTI)            Hindustan Times            Outlook          Indian Express       CNN News18     News18 Bangla (TV)           News18 Bangla (Web)         Deccan Herald         Careers360          Analytics India Magazine          NDTV            Firstpost           India Blooms           Business Insider        The Week          Aaj Tak         India Today

IIT Kharagpur has set up research funding for R&D work related to COVID-19. The Institute submitted a list of projects to the IIT Council last week of which 8 projects have been selected.

Dr Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, Hon’ble Minister, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Govt. of India appreciated and acknowledged the initiative by the Institute on his social media handle congratulating the Director Prof. Virendra Kumar Tewari and his team of researchers.

Talking about the initiative Director Tewari said “It is our responsibility to improve the quality of life of the last person in the society. While we built some quick technologies to cater to the immediate needs of the essential service providers at the campus, we were simultaneously preparing project proposals and evaluating them keeping in mind the immediate need of the country, cost and product delivery period.”

The researchers would be working on several technologies including design and development of rapid diagnostic kit, real-time PCR machine, body suit for COVID-19 patients, personal protective equipment for healthcare workers and portable shredder integrated with sterilizer, Hazmat Suit with forced purified and cooled air circulation for medical professionals, bootstrapping ambu-bag as automated ventilator, telemedicine for fighting viral pandemic, large scale production of recombinant proteins for vaccine and testing.

An amount of Rs. 50 Lakh has been allotted for phase I of 8 projects towards development of prototypes. For most of these projects, the prototypes are expected to be ready within a duration of 3 – 4 weeks, while a couple of them would take about 6 months to deliver the results. The phase I is expected to start immediately after the lockdown is relaxed and the research staff are able to attend the laboratories. Meanwhile software related work would progress as usual.

“IIT Kharagpur has a proven track record towards development of indigenous health and hygiene technologies which are affordable, high-quality at par with globally accepted standards, and commercially viable. Our researchers are committed to deliver the prototypes within a constrained timeline considering the healthcare needs in the current situation,” added Prof. Tewari.

1 Development of smartphone-integrated paper-strip kit for rapid low-cost diagnostics of COVID-19 infection Prof. Arindam Mondal and Prof. Suman Chakraborty
2 Design and Development of an indigenous Real Time PCR Machine Prof. Anandaroop Bhattacharya, Prof. Prasanta K. Das, Prof. Suman Chakraborty (ME Dept), with inputs from Dept. of Biotechnology and Physics
3 Towards large scale Production of Recombinant Proteins for Vaccine and Testing of Novel COVID-19 Prof. Sudip K. Ghosh, Prof. Ananta K. Ghosh and Prof. Ramkrishna Sen
4 Bootstrapping the ambu-bag as automated ventilator Prof. Aditya Bandopadhyay + Faculty and Students from ME Dept
5 Design and Development of a Bodysuit for COVID-19 Patients to Prevent the Spread of Infection Prof. Nishant Chakravorty
6 Telemedicine for fighting viral pandemic such as COVID-19 Prof. Jayanta Mukhopadhyay
7 A Hazmat Suit with Forced Purified and Cooled Air Circulation for Medical Professionals Prof. Manoj Kumar Mondal
8 Personal Protective Equipment for Health Care Workers
Prof. Santanu Dhara and Prof. Sangeeta Das Bhattacharya
8.a. Portable shredder integrated with sterilizer

SPARC Workshop Explores Critical Challenges of Children’s Healthcare

The School of Medical Science and Technology at IIT Kharagpur recently held an Indo-UK Residential Workshop in collaboration with the University of Manchester, UK, on the “Practical Management of Inherited Pediatric Hematological Disorders”. The focus was on clinical reasoning of cases related to children’s blood and bone marrow disorders using an interactive problem-based learning approach with direct interactions with globally renowned experts.

The areas covered in the workshop included the workup of the child presenting with signs and symptoms of reduction in the number of various blood cells, or cytopenias including pancytopenia or bone marrow failure. Workup included understanding the genetics behind certain syndromes, targeted testing, and treatment planning including an overview of bone marrow transplantation. Other topics covered included understanding cognitive errors in clinical decision making and computerized clinical decision support systems.

Experts from IIT Kharagpur, University of Manchester, Tata Medical Center and Tata Translational Cancer Research Centre, Kolkata, and NRS Medical College participated in this three-day workshop which was sponsored under the Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration (SPARC), an initiative of Ministry of Human Resource Development, Govt. of India.

Among the speakers were Prof. Vaskar Saha from the University of Manchester and Director of the Tata Translational Cancer Research Center a pediatric oncologist and hematologist and an expert in the care of children with leukemia. He worked through cases with participants to guide thinking on how to approach the child with a complex bone marrow disorder to come up with a diagnosis that could then lead to a treatment plan. Dr. Shekhar Krishnan, senior consultant in paediatrics hematology and oncology at TMC-TTCRC discussed bone marrow transplant.

Diagnosis was a focus area of the workshop. Dr. Niharendu Ghara senior paediatric consultant at TMC-TTCRC Kolkata discussed targeted approaches to diagnostic testing making sure to find the right test for the right situation, Dr. Rajib De from NRS Medical College discussed thalassemia in the context of Eastern India and approaches to screening, diagnosis, and management.

Prof. Jayanta Mukhopadhyay from IIT Kharagpur’s Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering discussed automated clinical decision support systems and their role in improving clinical decision making. Prof. Sangeeta Das Bhattacharya of SMST discussed cognitive errors in clinical decision making.

Students from diverse areas such as MBBS, Masters in Medical Science & Technology, MD, postdoctoral fellows, and clinical fellows in hematology participated in the workshop. The participants gained insights from master clinicians in real-time in clinical reasoning through case-based learning.

Innovating for Rural Healthcare

Financial Express           Times Now           Economic Times           The Hitavada             The Week           Amar Ujala              Sakshi              Business Standard              Millennium Post            Express Healthcare

Do you think compact discs are devices of the past? May be for your laptops, but not for researchers at IIT Kharagpur who have redefined the use of CDs for low-cost medical diagnostics. Researchers from IIT Kharagpur led by Professor Suman Chakraborty from the Department of Mechanical Engineering have recently innovated a simple low-cost motorized spinning disc-based kit to perform Complete Blood Count (CBC).

CBC is a collection of the most commonly required blood tests that is routinely suggested by the medical doctors, to assess a wide range of diseases spanning from common fever to cancer. The existing methods for this test are prohibitively expensive in the tune of ₹ 200 for the underprivileged population due to the requirements of sophisticated instrumentation and trained personnel.

“We have proposed a unique low-cost kit comprising a motorized device as a blood cell counting platform. The device is a simple spinning disc running on a small motor which is capable of performing the test whereby the parameters such as haematocrit (packed volume of red blood cells), haemoglobin, red blood cell (RBC), white blood cell (WBC), and platelet counts are estimated with an accuracy higher than 95 % as compared to an automated haematology analyser,” said Prof. Chakraborty.

This novel innovation which included Ph.D students Rahul Agarwal and Devdeep Mukherjee, and Post Doctoral Fellows Arnab Sarkar and Arka Bhowmik has recently been reported in Biosensors and Bioelectronics, a high-impact flagship Journal from Elsevier. [Download Paper]

Explaining the methodology, Ph.D students Rahul Agarwal and Devdeep Mukherjee said, “The method essentially exploits the difference in densities of cells for separation in a rotating disc due to centrifugal force and implements label-free imaging method for counting the separated cells within the spinning disc.”

The researchers highlighted on the biodegradability of the disc after using it for multiple sample testing.

“The design and fabrication techniques have been kept simple along with potential automation thereby making the device portable and eliminating the need of trained personnel. Most significantly, eliminating any need for downstream processing of the separated blood,” remarked Post Doctoral Fellows Arnab Sarkar and Arka Bhowmik.

This innovation is expected to bring down the cost of one Complete Blood Count test to about ₹10.

“Such an innovation of medical device may result in a paradigm shift in providing diagnostic services to the underserved rural population at large. The upcoming superspecialty hospital of IIT Kharagpur would operate in a hub and spoke model, and would use several of such devices to ensure improved reach of telemedicine and mobile healthcare to the last man of the society,” said Director V K Tewari.

Regarding commercial product development and availability, Prof. Suman Chakraborty reaching out to MSMEs.

“The Common Research & Technology Development Hub on Technologies for Affordable Healthcare supported by the Government of India’s DSIR aims to support growth & development of precision manufacturing of innovative technologies through MSMEs to reduce India’s massive import in healthcare technologies and their affordability and accessibility. The CBC kit will be a key product which could be licensed and be made market ready by MSMEs connected to this Hub,” he said.

More such healthcare technology commercialization is in the process confirmed Chakraborty.

Smart Diagnostics for Pulmonary Healthcare

Business Standard (IANS)   Business Standard (PTI)    Deccan Chronicle   Biospectrum     Outlook    Quint     Devdiscourse

Researchers at the Dept. of Electronics and Electrical Communications Engineering at IIT Kharagpur have developed a decision support system to diagnose malignant and other diseased tissues in the lungs. While one system can refer to CT scan images to detect lung nodules and test them for the possibility of malignancy, a second software can detect Interstitial Lung Disease (ILD) patterns in chest HRCT images.

“Biopsy especially in the lungs is a critical process, hence conducted only after initial medical analysis is done by expert radiologists. The developed systems use noninvasive and comparatively affordable methods of image analysis that would aid the radiologists to identify malignancy by reading growth in the lung nodules. The other system will help identify interstitial disease patterns in HRCT images depicting the lung tissue texture,” explained lead researcher Prof. Sudipta Mukhopadhyay.

“The novelty of the system lies in its India-centric reference point i.e. the medical image scan database used for reference is sought from the Indian patient population. We worked with Prof. Khandelwal and his team from PGIMER Chandigarh for data ground truth and clinical data. Also, foreign database such as LIDC-IDRI and MedGIFT ILD database has been used. The biopsy cases were primarily taken from PGIMER,” explained researcher Shrikant Mehre.

The malignancy detecting tool detects the lung nodule, segment the nodule, and provides a way to modify segmentation, retrieve similar nodules from the database with their report and assess the chance of malignancy of the query nodule based on the retrieval results. The ILD tool is developed by incorporating feedback from expert radiologists to make it easy to use for non-tech savvy clinicians. The software is equipped with necessary modules such as automatic segmentation of lung boundary and pathological region within lung area, provision to modify the boundary, retrieving similar segments from the database with their report and assess the probability of the pathological segment to be a particular ILD category based on the retrieval results. The mapping of disease is performed by doctors based on the ILD pattern and clinical inputs.

“We have successfully tested both software systems at AIIMS Delhi. Prof. Ashu Seith Bhalla and her team provided the neutral test site required for the validation. Currently, lung nodule detection rate and classification rate is 86% and 87%, respectively, and the success rate for ILD classification is 84%. We are working towards further improvements in order to conduct clinical trials on bigger sample sizes,” said another researcher Mandar Kale.

With the growing cases of cancer and other respiratory diseases in India, the need for skilled radiologists is expected to grow exponentially in near future. Budding radiologists will be highly benefited in learning from previous images stored in Picture Archival and Communication System (PACS) and reports in Radiological Information System (RIS) on their own and to help practicing radiologists in differential diagnosis using the CBIR based Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system.

The research has been reported in more than 13 international journals and 19 international conferences through its various stages of progress.