Niramai aims to disrupt diagnostics industry
The company is aiming to develop a device that can do full-body screening to detect range of diseases, besides making hardware innovation to further bring down the cost of breast cancer screening in India.
Hyderabad: Niramai Health Analytix, which offers artificial intelligence (AI) and thermal-imaging-based breast cancer screening and fever test, is aiming to develop a device that can do full-body screening to detect range of diseases, besides making hardware innovation to further bring down the cost of breast cancer screening in India. Breast cancer today accounts for over 25 per cent of all cancers women suffer.
The company has conducted over 36,000 screenings so far and has over 60 installations at hospitals and diagnostic centres across 15 cities. The company also aims to cater to breast health to benefit would-be mothers, screening abnormalities using thermal imaging, for which the patent has already been obtained.
Nirama’s proprietary technology Thermalytix uses a high-resolution thermal sensing device and a cloud-hosted analytics solution, which suits women of all age groups helping detect breast cancer at a much earlier stage than traditional screening method-mammography. In Hyderabad, Niramai provides breast cancer screening centres at three Apollo clinics, UmAnG Health Centre and Lumbini Jewel mall, besides offering home screening. Over 5,000 screenings have been carried in rural Telangana alone.
Dr Geetha Manjunath, founder and CEO of Niramai, told Telangana Today, “Early detection is key for breast cancer treatment and to ensure quality of life to the patient post-surgery.
Detection in stage 1 is crucial and in India detections are usually in stage 3. We wanted to address this. Niramai is also consciously ramping up rural screening and over 60 per cent of screening today is all rural. We are encouraging nano-entrepreneurs to take up rural screening.”
“Both capex and opex benefits of our screening method weigh over the traditional method. We have brought down the cost of screening to one-tenth and aim to bring it to one-twentieth. Our device tracks temperature variations of the chest. Overall, 17 abnormal thermal patterns/parameters are evaluated to obtain a score to identify if there are any hotspots and cancer cell growth. We advise individuals to go for annual screening and based on the score, we may even suggest tests every six months,” she explained.
FeverTest screening
Niramai is associated with home-based diagnostic platform 1mg and medical services health-tech company Healthians for FeverTest screening.
The company recently received research funding from CDC-UK for its new thermal-screening solution, a software that enables screening for Covid-19 symptoms in public places, using computer vision and AI to analyse and monitor crowd compliance to Covid-19 guidelines.
Regulatory approvals
Niramai received the CE Mark approval, ISO 13485 and MDSAP (Medical Device Single Audit Program) certifications. The company will expand to Europe and Africa and by the end of 2021, there will be pilot market tests. “We have been granted 21 patents in the US, India, Singapore, China and Canada. We have applied for seven more patents,” she added.
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