How the Ai Nature application can help in the management of snakebites -By Dr. Khosrow Rajabizadeh

About the speaker:

Dr.  Khosrow Rajabizadeh has 15 years of academic background in herpetology, leading to PhD in biology from Ghent University in Belgium, followed by a postdoc in functional morphology and applied computer science. He is the founder of AI.Nature start up studio in Paris.

About the talk:

Snake envenomation is a public health challenge in many tropical and subtropical countries, mostly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The WHO recently considered snake-bite envenomation as a neglected tropical disease, which is an important milestone in disease control. About 5.4 million snake bites occur each year, resulting in about 81.000 to 137.000 deaths and around three times as many permanent disabilities each year (www.who.int). This human-snake conflict partly results from the difficulty of snake identification that currently relies on expert knowledge. Snake identification help doctors to better plan the snakebite treatment. AI.Nature is a French startup project, incubated in INRIA, Paris, and tries to combine AI and zoological science to help doctors in the identification of snakes. AI.Nature produced a web application that provides AI-based services for 1) image-based snake auto-identification; 2) location-based snake identification. The web application is already launched for western Asia and northern Africa and is tested by doctors, even in real cases.