AI can transform healthcare in areas lacking specialists: Soumya Swaminathan

February 21, 2026
She noted that in many parts of India and in regions such as Africa, there is a shortage of radiologists, psychiatrists and pathologists. Swaminathan said one of the simplest and most effective uses of AI is image and pattern recognition, which can help in reading X-rays and pathology slides, provided the algorithms are trained on high-quality datasets.