The Birth of CognitiveCare - World's First AI Platform to Predict Maternal & Infant Risk | Part-I

For those of us who have had the honor and joy of becoming parents, we sure know the feeling. However, advancements in science and medicine notwithstanding, healthy childbirth still eludes millions of mothers across the globe. While maternal mortality has reduced significantly over years, 810 mothers still lose their lives every day and millions more go through complicated pregnancies – the effects of which – continue to impact the long-term health of both mothers and babies.

The good thing though is that – thanks to advancements in computing (Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Biology, computing horsepower, etc.), we are now closer than we ever were to understand the genesis of these complications early.

Finding Purpose in Our Work

Drawing upon our experience of putting computing behind numerous pressing challenges ranging from early detection of terrorist behaviors to tax evasion to money laundering, we started CognitiveCare in 2018 with a rather audacious goal to detect diseases early. For the first 9 months, we experimented with a few areas – namely, pathology, oncology, and mental health. Mining longitudinal pathology data of more than half a million patients gave us deep insights into the evolution of NASH, Myeloma, and chronic as well as acute renal failures. We were able to statistically compute the overall effect of alternate treatments on patients with multiple myeloma by analyzing the effects of treatments based on their genetic and lifestyle determinants.

While renowned scientists and investors lauded us for our ideas and approach but cautioned us that we must focus on a particular disease area to demonstrate the scientific depth and rigor required for validation by the scientific and medical fraternity. While we were keen to build a platform that can eventually grow and scale to handle all diseases, to build credibility and depth, we needed to focus. Within 10 months of our launch, we were back at the drawing board to identify our focus areas. We narrowed it down to 2: Maternal Health and Mental Health. Given the availability of vast data and the immediate impact that we could generate, we chose Maternal health to bring our laser focus on.

Working with leading physician-scientists, we identified a set of 47 possible maternal, fetal, and infant health risks/outcomes. Armed with a sample data of 1000 pregnant mothers, we built a set of neural networks that have analyzed medical, clinical, radiological, genetic, social, and lifestyle determinants to detect and quantify maternal and infant health risks with more than 90% accuracy. Our models now deliver 48 MIHIC™ (Maternal Infant Health Insights and Cognitive Intelligence) scores indicating the propensity of any of these risks occurring in mothers besides statistically computing the overall MIHIC™ score of the mother.

We are now laser-focused towards our mission: to eradicate maternal and infant mortality.

A Priceless Milestone

We needed real patients’ data to validate our work. We bet our shirts off a partnership with one of the world’s leading medical institutions for pregnancy data. Despite COVID occupying all immediate priorities, we succeeded in receiving all the necessary approvals (IRB, Legal, HIPAA) to receive medical, clinical, and radiological data of more than 12,000 pregnant mothers and their newborns covering the pre-natal, neo-natal, and post-natal stages. Evidence from our model validation will find its way to leading medical journals in the world. In addition, the enhanced credibility of this approval is doing wonders for us – more leading scientists and surgeons are keen to collaborate with us paving the way to establish a multi-institutional consortium of medical schools to help acquire close to 100,000 patients’ data to further validate our work. Validating the MIHIC™ scores at such a scale offers us the extraordinary opportunity to seek regulatory approvals from the FDA and other such regulatory entities globally. A small but incredibly giant leap in our journey.

MIHIC – Your Companion for Motherhood

I am more than curious to share how we have shaped up the MIHIC™ platform to be a lifesaver. Just to avoid the article being too lengthy, I have decided to publish the second part of this. See you in Part-II.