New Delhi: India is advancing efforts to combat preterm births—a leading cause of neonatal mortality—through a government-backed initiative focused on developing artificial intelligence (AI)-driven pregnancy care solutions.
The GARBH-INi programme has enrolled over 12,000 pregnant women to create one of South Asia’s largest pregnancy datasets. The initiative has collected more than 1.6 million biospecimens and over one million ultrasound images, forming a robust data foundation to train AI models for personalised risk prediction tailored to the Indian population.
Minister of State for Science and Technology, Jitendra Singh, highlighted India’s substantial contribution to the global burden of preterm births, underscoring the need for locally developed, population-specific healthcare solutions.
Early outcomes from the programme include AI-based pregnancy dating tools, microbiome-based predictors of preterm birth, rapid diagnostic technologies, and the identification of genetic markers to enable earlier and more accurate risk assessment.
The initiative has also established a national biorepository and a data-sharing platform, GARBH-INi-DRISHTI, to facilitate research collaboration and wider access to data. Findings from the programme are contributing to global scientific research.
To accelerate translation into clinical practice, partnerships have been forged with organisations such as Sundyota Numandis Probioceuticals, Doto Health, and Qure.ai. These collaborations aim to develop AI-enabled ultrasound reporting systems, microbiome-based therapeutics, and advanced risk stratification tools.
In its next phase, the GARBH-INi programme will focus on scaling and deploying these predictive models in real-world healthcare settings, with an emphasis on improving maternal and child health outcomes across the country.
The initiative aligns with broader government efforts to build diverse medical datasets, including national repositories for life sciences and multi-omics cancer databases, to accelerate AI-driven innovation in healthcare.
Separately, Doto Health has expanded its international footprint through partnerships with FHI 360, working with health departments in Vietnam and Laos to deploy digital health solutions aimed at reducing maternal and infant mortality.