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Organization Contact Information | |
| Name: | EPCON bvba |
| Street 1: | Sint-Pietersvliet 7 |
| Street 2: | |
| City: | Antwerp |
| Province: | Antwerp |
| Post Code: | 2000 |
| Country: | Belgium |
| Phone: | +32475948865 |
| Organization Email: | vincent@epcon.ai |
| Web Site: | http://www.epcon.ai |
| Other Online Presence: | |
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General Information | |
| Board Constituency: | None |
| Is your organization legally registered in your country: | Yes |
| If yes, please enter your registration number: | |
| Organization Type - Primary: | Private Sector |
| Organization Type - Secondary: | Development |
| Organization Description: | |
| Mission: Using innovation and spatially enabled technology EPCON wants to help find all presumed TB patients, assist in diagnoses, monitor and drive their wellbeing, identify hotspots and also predict future focus areas. Focus: Using artificial intelligence and bayesian reasoning our system can analyse cause and effect patterns and aims to increase program effectiveness and optimise country resource allocation. IoT methods will help us reach patients, community health workers and healthcare facilities. Why? With over 1,6 million death/year we are convinced that technology can play a role in identifying and preventing this los. Country specific and socio demographic challenges in many TB outbreak regions require different and innovative approaches to help identify, monitor and evaluate patients ... this is our speciality. |
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| Do you know about the UNHLM declaration: | |
Specializations / Areas of Work | |
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Provision of drugs, diagnostics and commodities Research and Development Technical Assistance |
Other Organization Information | |
| Total number of staff in your organization: | 11 - 25 |
| Number of full-time staff who are directly involved with TB: | 1 - 5 |
| Number of part-time staff who are directly involved with TB: | 6 - 10 |
| Number of volunteers who are directly involved with TB: | 0 |
| How did you hear about the Stop TB Partnership: | Attendance at a TB related event |
| If you were informed or referred by another partner of the Stop TB Partnership please tell us who: | Jackie Huh / StopTB |
| Why do you wish join the Stop TB Partnership: | Involvement in Stop TB Working Groups |
| Are you a member of a Stop TB national partnership: | No |
| Are you in contact with your national TB programme: | Yes |
| Please tell us how your organization is contributing to your country's national TB control plan: | |
| In 2016 one of our founding companies Riskscape in South Africa was requested to investigate the impact of TB in the mining industry in Southern Africa. This study has contributed to the believe that combining spatial contextual data (eg population density, migration, occupational information, etc) with Artificial Intelligence will help us in a more direct and effective way to identify hotspot regions, and use aggregated (real time) data from field programs to monitor, evaluate and steer country TB programs. This will contribute to better optimised country resource allocations and help push the information up to the community health worker. In Belgium we receive support through a participation from IMEC NV (a strong global research organisation with focus on ehealth) |
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Geographical Reach | |
| Which country is your headquarters located in: | Belgium |
| Which countries do you do operate in: (This includes countries you are conducting activities in) |
Algeria Angola Belgium Benin Bolivia Botswana Brazil Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cape Verde Central African Republic Chad China Colombia Comoros Congo Cote d'Ivoire Democratic Republic of the Congo Djibouti Egypt Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Ethiopia Gambia Ghana Guinea Guinea-Bissau Indonesia Iran (Islamic Republic of) Iraq Kenya Lao People's Democratic Republic Lesotho Liberia Libyan Arab Jamahiriya Madagascar Malawi Mali Mauritania Mauritius Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Niger Nigeria Pakistan Peru Philippines Romania Russian Federation Rwanda Sao Tome and Principe Saudi Arabia Senegal Seychelles Sierra Leone Somalia South Africa South Sudan Sudan Togo Tunisia Uganda United Republic of Tanzania Viet Nam Zambia Zimbabwe |
Contribution | |
| Please tell us how your organization will contribute to the Global Plan to Stop TB by briefly describing its involvement in any of the areas of work listed below: | |
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TB Care Delivery: Our technology supports electronic survey activities and can interact with community members and assist patients in their pathway to care. The system can search for the easiest way to interact through sms, chatboxes or voice using chatbot technology. We believe it is important to have an all inclusive model where all levels and interactions with patients happen in coordinated way. Top down and bottom up. - The system learns from contextual, historical and present data where TB focus areas are located. - It helps in the diagnostic process during the survey by combining symptoms with contextual information and increase its correctness during the process. - The system interacts with community health workers or patients on next steps to take. Through service provision assessment it can direct presumed patients to nearest facility for further diagnostics or care. At present we seek to deploy our technology through KIT Amsterdam in a pilot program in Tanzania and are in the process of engaging with other parties across the globe. The pilot will focus on using bayesian reasoning models to identify cause and effect patterns and aims to direct the country TB program to the correct focus areas. This should increase the program yield and contribute to better resource allocation. Drug-Resistant TB: Having the ability to monitor patients through their pathway to care we can interact with them in a scalable manner allowing for better monitoring during their treatment. In addition the system allows georeferencing diagnostic xpert results which can help identify highest concentrations of MDR-TB. This allows for more targeted communication and education towards MDR-TB affected regions. In countries with many informal settlements our system makes use of mapcode technology to enable individual patient or household universal and unique locations. This allows for better follow up and direct care throughout their recovery process. TB-HIV: With HIV / TB co-infection close to 60% in some of the Southern African countries we use HIV prevalence data as part of the regional and contextual information. This data is fed to the core AI engine and will contribute to its reasoning model. Our platform aims to reuse existing literature to assess the risk of TB amongst HIV patients and their affected regions of residence / occupation. New Diagnostics: One of the solutions to our platform is to offer Computer Aided Diagnostic services for Chest X-ray. Our CAD solution combines both convolutional neural networks and bayesian reasoning to improve the outcome and results. This solution is in the making and being tested at this point (august 2018). Besides the CAD for CXR we aim to use Pulse Oximeters and to develop Coughing Monitors to help diagnose presumed TB patients. All data gets aggregated and georeferenced in real-time using IoT methods to provide fast response and program steering. Research: Through IMEC's equity participation in EPCON our company secured access to over 3.500 researchers across the globe. IMEC is one of top research organisations and is specialised in nano electronics and digital technologies. EPCON brings together expertise and research in the field spatial technologies, artificial intelligence and TB. For over 8 years our teams have worked on its present AI engine and use bayesian reasoning as one of its main differentiators. With EPCON its founding members wanted to create a platform combining the various areas of expertise and create the focus needed to help achieve the WHO 80-90-100 goals. |
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Declaration | |
| Declaration of interests: No conflicts of interest were delacred. | |
| Application date: | August 29, 2018 |
| Last updated: | August 30, 2018 |