The Good Doctor With An Eye For Al

Precision healthcare is growing exponentially due to the application of Al in oncology. MedTech entrepreneur Dr Kingsley Ndoh is leading in this regard from Rwanda, helping oncologists and their patients in sub-Saharan Africa.

- Tiana Cline

Dr Kingsley Ndoh lost his aunt over a decade ago to colorectal cancer. She was only 51 years old and prior to her diagnosis, she was having high-risk abdominal symptoms. But in Nigeria, where Ndoh was both born and studied D medicine, the screening guidelines for colorectal cancer begin at the age of 50.

"She didn't even get the chance to have a screening," he says. "What I realized is that a lot of the guidelines and treatments don't work for all populations. It has to be specific to genetics, to the epidemiology and to the clinical context of those regions." This was one of the reasons Ndoh decided that he wanted to get more training in oncology and that meant moving to the United States (US) to study global health. "I wanted to work at a population level," explains Ndoh, who ended up at the University of Washington which was followed by a short-term fellowship at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center - "my foray into the world of global oncology," he says.

But it was sitting on a plane, flying back home to Nigeria that sparked Ndoh's interest in technology - and more specifically, artificial intelligence (AI). "I read a book by Jerry Kaplan called Humans Need Not Apply and became fascinated by the possibilities of AI that were mentioned in healthcare. But when I started digging into it, I realized that a lot of the AI products that are being rolled out and tested in the different aspects of healthcare deal mainly with Caucasian data and not in the context of places like sub-Saharan Africa.”