The Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research is in the process of developing a mobile-based application that will help patients to monitor asthma by identifying symptoms and personalised medication.
It is a two-year project in collaboration with the Ministry of Health, Government of India. The app will use a diagnostic and therapeutic algorithm to ascertain the personalised medicines for patients. The neural network in artificial intelligence (AI) will group patients in ‘severe’ or ‘mild’ category to personalise the treatment scheme.
Dr. Anil Chauhan, who is associated with the project, said: “A cohort of 10,000 records, as old as 20 years, of asthmatic children will be analysed through ‘deep learning’ (a subset of artificial intelligence). The data will be incorporated in the electronic medical record so that a follow-up on the medical condition of every child can be managed easily.”
Patients will be able to assess the mobile application and send reports of various tests such as pulmonary function tests (PFTs) or the asthma control test to the doctors concerned. Both doctors and patients will be able to view the medical history of the patient.
“Through the database, we can see the types of changes required in treatment guidelines. Currently, the records of patients are being uploaded,” said Chauhan.
Prof Meenu Singh, Department of Pediatrics, PGI, said: “One medicine cannot be prescribed to all patients as there are different kinds of allergies. Precision medicine decides what kind of treatment will help every patient.”
Precision medicine is an approach to patient care that allows doctors to select treatments that are most likely to help patients based on a genetic understanding of their disease.
“All asthmatics don’t react in a similar way to the same drugs. The complications are so much that a poorly controlled asthma takes the form of allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis (ABPA),” said Prof Meenu Singh, who is also a member of the Executive Committee, Indian Academy of Allergy, Congress Chair, IAACON 2020.
