Nigerian student, others develop medical app for diagnosis

Forum 1 year ago

Nigerian student, others develop medical app for diagnosis

NIGERIAN students in different parts of the world keep making impressive strides in different disciplines. Couple of weeks ago, Tony Okeke, 20, who was the winner of the 2018 edition of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, National Science Quiz Competition, but who is presently studying Biomedical Engineering in Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, collaborated with five other international students (four Nigerians and one Indian) to develop an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Medical Assistance App, which they named ‘Meddibia’.

Okeke’s team, named, ‘Team Meddibia’, comprises Okeke, Dishika Goel, Elochukwu Enwerem, Dalu Okonkwo, Michael Moemeke and Victor Uzo.

The team’s project, ‘Meddibia’, was one of the ten AI projects that won at the Philly Codefest 2023, a contest that took place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA during the 10th year of the software and hardware hackathon hosted by College of Computing & Informatics, Drexel University, Philadelphia.

Explaining how difficult it was for the panel of judges ot determine the winners, Dave Raiken, Assistant Director of Operations, said the 46 teams that took part, presented great technical projects that aligned with the theme: AI Everywhere— that is, “real-world, scalable software and hardware solutions to improve and expand artificial intelligence’s positive societal impacts.”  

Presenting their project on behalf of his team, Okeke explained: “The inspiration behind our latest project came from a deep desire to improve the accessibility of medical care for people living in rural areas. As developers from third-world countries, we understood all too well the struggles faced by those who lack access to proper medical facilities. Our team wanted to create a solution that would bridge the gap between these individuals and medical professionals, so we set out to create an app that would allow users to receive medical advice and diagnoses using machine learning models.”

What it does

Meddibia is a personal AI health assistant that puts greater control over health in the hands of users living in rural communities. With it, users can describe their symptoms to a chat assistant and receive a likely diagnosis, along with more information about their diagnosis and symptoms. Additionally, it enables users to get diagnosis for skin conditions and aberrations by simply taking a picture of the affected area. This feature is especially important for those with limited access to healthcare professionals or specialized facilities. By providing personalized care and making it easier to manage health conditions, Meddibia empowers users to take control of their health and improve their quality of life.

How it was built  

To accurately identify skin conditions, the team experimented with various pre-trained models, including VGG16 and EfficientNet, to extract features from images from the dermnet dataset. They then trained and evaluated deep neural network classifiers, ultimately selecting a model with approximately 70% accuracy. For symptom identification, they employed GPT-3, a state-of-the-art language model, to preprocess natural language input from users into symptom labels, which served as input to our machine-learning model. This approach resulted in about 87% accuracy in predicting disease labels. To further assist users, and used GPT-3 to provide helpful descriptions of the predicted disease. The app’s backend was built using Flask API and deployed on Heroku, while the cross-platform frontend was developed using Flutter, making our app easily accessible to users across multiple devices.

Provost, FCE, Akoka assures new intakes of quality education

By Elizabeth Osayande & Mary Obaebor

THE Provost, Federal Technical College (Technical), Akoka, Dr. Wahab Azeez, has said the newly admitted students are lucky to have functional new infrastructure for an improved conducive learning environment that include the new science laboratories; technical workshop and   fine and applied arts studios; among others.

He stated this at the 2022/2023 Nigeria Certificate in Education, NCE, and Professional Diploma in Education, PDE, matriculation ceremony held in the College premises.  

He added that through the Centre for Vocational Technical and Entrepreneurship Development, CeVTED, they could acquire extra skills.

FEC Technical Provost enjoined the 382   newly admitted NEC students and 30 PDE students, to imbibe good moral and academic virtues, and avail themselves of opportunities the College offers.

“Part of the opportunities available to students,” he said, “is the prize for the best student in the use of the College library.”

Dr   Azeez also announced that the College has entered into partnership with the University of Benin, UNIBEN, to offer courses leading to Bachelor of Arts and Science (Education). 

He added that the College would soon sign a Memorandum of Understanding, MoU, with   the Lagos State University, LASU, Ojo, to run sandwich degree programmes in most programmes under  Vocational, Technical and Business Education.