Karun Kaushik: Indian-American teen helping fight pneumonia with a cost-effective AI solution

(January 12, 2023) 2020 had just begun and things were getting difficult for California boy Karun Kaushik as a delayed pneumonia treatment due to an inaccurate diagnosis nearly cost him his mother’s life. The harrowing experience put him face-to-face with Covid-19 and the grim reality of pneumonia – a global killer that took the lives of 2.5 million people in the world, out of which 600,000 were children under the age of five. The startling statistics led the Indian American teen to think on his toes as Covid-19 had only exacerbated the situation.

With many relatives in India, he was concerned about the hospitals in India as he knew from visits that they had nowhere near the resources or technology necessary to save lives like his mother’s. As the world went into lockdown and Covid-19 swept across the globe, the 17-year-old spoke with radiologists in India, who confirmed that overwhelming patient volume and impossible working conditions were creating diagnostic bottlenecks, resulting in unnecessary deaths.

That’s when the Indian-American teen decided to focus on developing a solution to remove the ever-building backlogs. He spent months learning Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create X-Check-MD, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) software that can diagnose Covid-19 and pneumonia with 99 percent accuracy in under one minute. It won him the Gloria Barron Prize 2022 for Young Heroes.

We’re wowed by 2022 Barron Prize winner Karun, who created AI software that can diagnose Covid-19 and pneumonia with 99% accuracy in under one minute. His tool is part of Democratize Health, the nonprofit he founded to save lives in impoverished regions. Grateful for you, Karun! pic.twitter.com/VFM9ODc7cu

— Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes (@BarronPrize) December 13, 2022

This innovation led to the birth of Democratize Health in March 2020, a non-profit initiative to empower healthcare workers in underprivileged communities with fast, affordable, accurate, and remotely accessible artificial intelligence-based diagnostics solutions. “It’s easy to feel hopeless at times with the issues the world is facing but, in my opinion, hope is our strongest resource and weapon,” Karun said in an interview.

So how does X-Check-MD work? It allows doctors to take a picture of an X-ray with their mobile phone’s camera, upload it to a globally accessible website, and receive a diagnosis within seconds, thus making the process faster, and cheaper than traditional methods where the typical turn-around time for diagnosis is 4-18 hours by radiologists. The 99 percent accuracy reduces the chances of misdiagnoses due to human errors such as visual and cognitive fatigue under overwhelm. It also eliminates the diagnostic backlog which is common in developing countries while helping reduce delays in treatment.

Karun Kaushik is the founder of Democratize Health

Democratize Health also educates impoverished communities about environmental risk factors, preventative measures like vaccines (as 71 million children didn’t get the full pneumococcal vaccine in 2018), and available treatment options. So far, it has impacted more than 3,000 people in India, and the non-profit believes that it has the potential to save the lives of 800,000 children worldwide who die from pneumonia each year.

Since this Global Indian provides the technology to doctors and hospitals for $2.75 per scan in India, he is hopeful it can help prevent deaths from pneumonia, 90 percent of which occur in the world’s poorest regions. Currently, he is working to expand global outreach for Democratize Health and build diagnostic solutions for more diseases. Karun, who was selected as a 2021 Global Teen Leader by the We Are Family Foundation, wants to ensure that no one’s health is left behind, regardless of their geography or socioeconomic status. “I want to drive change to make a better world.”