Around the world, healthcare systems are seeing a shift from having to deal with infectious ailments to addressing non-communicable disorders, such as cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular and neurovascular diseases. “What they have in common is that they are very personalised. In infectious diseases, there is a onesize-fits-all treatment, but for the drug in cancer for example, you need to find out exactly what the cancer is, where it is, and at what stage it is, and then make a personalised treatment decision,” says Bernd Montag, CEO of
Siemens Healthineers
.
One of the technologies that will help in this, he says, is artificial intelligence (AI). Siemens Healthineers, one of the world’s biggest
medical technology
companies, is among those working to bring AI to the cellular level so that across micro-domains, it can free up physician time, or even enable diagnosis where no doctor is present. “As an example, you can screen for TB in a remote area, when you don’t have a physician looking at the image,” says Bernd.
All this requires AI to understand medicine, and recognise what counts in a particular procedure. “You need to train the AI to differentiate a malignant tumour from a benign tumour, to automatically do the treatment planning for radiation therapy. Or, when you have multiple sclerosis, you need to train the AI to quantify what is the stage of multiple sclerosis,” he says.
An important field for Siemens Healthineers is cancer care, and creating an ecosystem for the same, one that encompasses early and accurate diagnosis and treatment, especially in low-resource set-ups in smaller towns. “We are building
cancer care
centres, where our type of technology is the backbone, whether it’s imaging or radiation therapy,” says Bernd.
In cancer care, imaging and therapy go hand in hand, and AI has a role to play here. “You do a CT scan for simulating – or planning – the treatment. And we have an AI algorithm that uses the images to look at which parts of the body need to be protected from the radiation, and where exactly the tumour is. And then the Linac (linear accelerator, a device that uses electricity to generate high-energy x-rays or electrons) is programmed to do exactly this,” Bernd says.
It’s possible, he says, to make this technology more and more user-independent and standardised, so that one doesn’t need physicians and other staff at every site to do this treatment.
A lot of such work is happening in Bengaluru, where Siemens has a software and
digital innovation
hub. “There is literally no Siemens product which doesn’t have Indian engineering, software engineering, digital and AI magic and creativity in it,” says Bernd. The India centre has over 3,000 engineers and specialists, and another 2,000-plus are expected to be added over the next five years in a new campus that the company is building.
He says the company is also committed to ‘
Make in India
’, locally producing, for instance, C-Arm X-ray machines, and MRI scanners. “In C-Arm machines, India is the hub for world production,” he says.
