BRAC University, National Institute of Nuclear Medicine & Allied Sciences explore possible avenues of collaboration

BRAC University and the National Institute of Nuclear Medicine & Allied Sciences (Ninmas) of Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission organized a meeting on the latter’s premises at Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University (BSMMU) on 7 February, 2023 to explore avenues of possible collaboration.

The delegation from BRAC University comprised Meem Arafat Manab, Lecturer of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering under the School of Data and Sciences and Manager of OSUN Science Shop under the School of General Education at BRAC University, Farhadul Islam Fuad, Teaching Assistant, and Joyanta Jyoti Mondal, Research Assistant.

OSUN Science Shop is currently a two-year pilot program supported by Open Society University Network (OSUN) and hosted by Central European University’s Community Engagement Office in cooperation with the European Humanities University in Lithuania and BRAC University in Bangladesh. The project focuses on stimulating engaged and experiential learning through student projects embedded in course curricula.

For more than two decades Ninmas has been producing nuclear medicine, which deals with using a trace amount of radioisotope for diagnosis and treatment of various diseases such as cancer. They have about 10 million high resolution radiological imaging data of over 8,000 patients which can be used for research. Currently, each diagnosis takes more than six hours for a team of five to six doctors, as they have to examine around a thousand high-resolution images for each patient, which can be cut by 50 per cent if state-of-the-art artificial intelligence is used, as evidenced abroad.

With more than 50 doctors and researchers in attendance, the meeting formed a tentative outline on how the School of Data and Sciences would provide technical expertise and OSUN Science Shop would handle the administrative duties and fundraising, with the eventual goal being on opening a collaborative medical informatics lab.

Presiding over the meeting, Hasan Mehdi Sifat, Scientific Officer at Ninmas, was highly enthusiastic about the prospects of partnership, saying, “Being a physics graduate now working among doctors, I know how important cross-disciplinary research is for long-term growth.”

Some reservations were expressed about ethical and privacy issues, notably by Dr. Shamim Momtaz Ferdousi Begum, Professor and the Director of the PET-CT Division.

Others had been more positive about the foreseeable outcomes. Dr. Sadia Sultana, Professor and Chief Medical Officer of the Nuclear Cardiology & Nuclear Nephrology Division, said, “We cannot let this amount of data remain unutilized. The data should be kept private, yes, but the patients will benefit if the work of doctors can be eased if artificial intelligence is employed.”

Dr. Nabeel Fahmi Ali, Senior Medical Officer at Ninmas and Assistant Professor of Oncology at the BSMMU, expressed strong interest in cooperation. He said, “I have seen works of this kind while I worked in China for three years. They were developing this right before my eyes. If we don’t start to incorporate AI with healthcare here right now, we will be falling much behind the rest of the world.”