The Health Entrepreneurship (HENT) Challenge’s first cohort is getting ready for their upcoming visit to Toronto, where they will continue their implementation phase through activities targeting business development, expanding entrepreneurial networks and facilitating exposure to potential investors.
In the meantime, the HENT Communications team caught up with the ventures from the first HENT Challenge cohort to learn more about the origins of their companies, what they’ve learned to date, and what is coming up next…
With only 200 radiologists in Kenya to serve a population of 5.5 million women who are at risk of developing breast cancer each year, Ian Omung’a, Nikita Muthuuri and Brian Mungai were inspired to create a solution for early breast cancer detection.
With 4 out of 5 Kenyan women being diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer, the mortality rate is at an all-time high. The long turn-around time for screening mammography reports due to a low radiologist-to-patient ratio is a key factor contributing to late diagnosis.
Thus, the team of three started Vectorgram Health in 2022, which has scaled the capacity of cancer screening by up to 100 times through Artificial Intelligence-powered diagnostics assistance tools. Instead of patients waiting for weeks to receive a mammogram report, Vectorgram Health now enables radiologists to interpret up to 10,000 mammograms in 1 minute. They are currently completing clinical validation at the largest referral hospital in East and Central Africa and will soon publish study results.
What is the accomplishment to date that your team is most proud of?
Since their launch, Vectorgram Health is proud to have won an outstanding research award at the Deep Learning Indaba 2022 continental research conference in Tunisia for their Machine Learning research on Breast Cancer Diagnosis in
low-data conditions.
If you could give advice to another founder getting started, what would that be?
“Get an ambitious, defining end-game goal and use it to translate your long-term ideals into your day-to-day culture. Having a larger-than-life north star to guide you and your team will be the inspiration you need when you inevitably encounter seemingly intractable problems.”
Vectorgram Health is looking forward to expanding across the hundreds of cancer screening centres in Kenya. Their next major goal is to onboard 100 hospitals across the country in the coming months, once clinical validation is completed.
You can learn more about Vectorgram Health
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