News

15 May 2026

Koita Centre for Digital Health at Ashoka University (KCDH-A) has been awarded the prestigious 𝐈𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐚-𝐒𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐚𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐉𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐭 𝐒𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝐆𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓, jointly supported by the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India and A*STAR, Singapore, for the project: “𝑻𝒐𝒘𝒂𝒓𝒅𝒔 𝑬𝒒𝒖𝒊𝒕𝒂𝒃𝒍𝒆 𝑯𝒐𝒓𝒊𝒛𝒐𝒏𝒔: 𝑨𝒏 𝑰𝒏𝒅𝒊𝒂-𝑺𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒂𝒑𝒐𝒓𝒆 𝑰𝒏𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒗𝒆 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝑪𝒖𝒍𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒚-𝑪𝒐𝒏𝒈𝒓𝒖𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝑽𝒊𝒔𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝑳𝒂𝒏𝒈𝒖𝒂𝒈𝒆 𝑴𝒐𝒅𝒆𝒍𝒔 𝒊𝒏 𝑹𝒂𝒅𝒊𝒐𝒍𝒐𝒈𝒚 𝑨𝑰.” The project represents one of the early large-scale India-Singapore efforts focused on building equitable and culturally-congruent foundation models for radiology AI in South Asian populations. Current state-of-the-art medical AI systems are predominantly trained on Western datasets and often demonstrate significant performance degradation and biases when deployed in Asian healthcare settings. Given the extraordinary demographic, socioeconomic, linguistic, environmental, and disease diversity across South Asia, there is a critical need for regionally representative datasets and foundational AI systems designed for our populations and healthcare realities.

This 3-year collaboration will focus on creating large indigenous radiology datasets, rigorously benchmarking existing AI systems for subgroup bias and performance disparities, and developing “for-Asia-by-Asia” vision-language models tailored for diverse healthcare environments across India and Singapore. The initiative aims to help lay the groundwork for trustworthy, equitable, and globally relevant medical foundation models emerging from South Asia. The project is led from the Indian side by Dr. Suvrankar Datta, Prof. Anurag Agrawal, and Dr. Jagjit Kaur at KCDH-A, Ashoka University, in collaboration with Asst. Prof. Swapnil Mishra and Assoc. Prof. Mengling 'Mornin' Feng from the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore (NUS).