Google Health announced a new partnership with Apollo Radiology International for early Disease detection using artificial intelligence (AI) in India. The announcement was made during the company’s annual event called “The Check Up.” As part of the partnership, technology giant Apollo will provide its AI stack for early disease detection. We will focus on three specific diseases: tuberculosis, lung cancer and breast cancer. Notably, Google also announced that it is working with Fitbit to develop a large-scale language model (LLM) focused on personal health, powered by Gemini.

“This is a situation where AI can make a difference,” said Shravaya Shetty, lead AI health engineer at Google Health, in a blog post. India’s latest collaboration with Apollo Radiology International is to advance AI in healthcare and bring it to communities across the country. Under this partnership, Apollo Radiology International will offer 3 million free tests in India over the next 10 years.

Google Health and Apollo Group have been working together for years. The focus of this special collaboration is to improve patient outcomes in India through the use of artificial intelligence to enable faster disease screening. The technology giant Apollo Radiology International wants to develop early detection systems for tuberculosis, breast cancer and lung cancer using artificial intelligence.

In this post, we explained the reasons for identifying these specific diseases and emphasized that tuberculosis kills more than 1.3 million people worldwide. Google also claimed that lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in India and that breast cancer deaths are three times higher in India than in the United States. Google added that early detection of the disease significantly improves the chances of survival in most cases.

However, according to this post, the main reason for the difficulty of early detection in India is the lack of trained radiologists who can quickly interpret screening images. This delays early detection. Additionally, the disease may go undetected during routine exams because radiologists are not looking for it. This is where artificial intelligence can come into play, Google said, using its capabilities to diagnose diseases on a large scale.