World Health Day: How AI is Changing the Game for Maternal and Newborn Health
Preventable Maternal and Newborn Deaths
Nearly 300,000 women across the globe die each year due to complications arising from pregnancy or childbirth. The number of stillborns and babies that die within their first month tops nearly 4M every year. On World Health Day, which this year focuses on raising awareness about efforts to end preventable maternal and newborn deaths, startups are turning to AI to address this critical social responsibility.
BrightHeart: AI-Powered Fetal Ultrasound Analysis
Two startups founded in 2022, with headquarters half a world apart, have begun rolling out AI-powered solutions to improve healthcare access for women and expectant mothers. BrightHeart, founded by two pediatric cardiologists, integrates AI with ultrasound equipment routinely found in doctors’ offices to support more comprehensive and accurate analyses of fetal ultrasounds.
Identifying Prenatal Heart Defects
The startup just earned FDA clearance for its platform, which helps identify prenatal heart defects that routine ultrasound exams often miss. About 1% of babies are born with a heart defect. Yet up to 70% of congenital heart defects are undetected before birth, which can lead to significantly worse outcomes for newborns, including hypoxia, brain damage, and a significantly higher risk of death.
How BrightHeart Works
BrightHeart’s AI coaches technicians, in near real-time, on improving how they’re capturing ultrasound imagery and looks for key morphological abnormalities that might indicate severe congenital heart defects. Identified heart abnormalities are then flagged for doctors, who set the course for intervention. BrightHeart uses NVIDIA L4 Tensor Core GPUs in the cloud through AWS, as well as NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit and NVIDIA cuDNN for training and inferencing its models.
March Health: AI-Powered Women’s Health
While BrightHeart looks deeply at fetal hearts, San Francisco-based March Health focuses on women—specifically on women who face difficulties becoming mothers. March Health uses AI to aggregate patients’ electronic health records to identify potential underlying conditions ranging from infertility to chronic pelvic pain.
How March Health Works
The startup creates bespoke digital twins of each patient, using healthcare data that includes biomarkers, medical history, and patient lifestyle information to identify potential medical conditions. Founder and CEO Mark Amouzgar said he started the company after he and his wife struggled to start a family. During that process, they observed the unnerving dynamic of women telling their doctors about their pain, only to have doctors routinely discount those reports.
Conclusion
On World Health Day, we recognize the critical need to address preventable maternal and newborn deaths. Startups like BrightHeart and March Health are leveraging AI to improve healthcare access for women and expectant mothers. By identifying prenatal heart defects and underlying medical conditions, these startups are empowering healthcare providers to intervene early and improve outcomes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is the purpose of World Health Day?
A: World Health Day is a global health awareness campaign that aims to promote health, prevent disease, and improve healthcare systems.
Q: How many women die each year due to complications arising from pregnancy or childbirth?
A: Nearly 300,000 women across the globe die each year due to complications arising from pregnancy or childbirth.
Q: What is the purpose of BrightHeart’s AI-powered platform?
A: BrightHeart’s AI-powered platform aims to identify prenatal heart defects that routine ultrasound exams often miss, allowing for early intervention and improved outcomes for newborns.
Q: How does March Health use AI to improve women’s health?
A: March Health uses AI to aggregate patients’ electronic health records to identify potential underlying conditions ranging from infertility to chronic pelvic pain, allowing for early diagnosis and treatment.
