IIT-Mandi gets US firm’s research project

Tribune News Service

Mandi, November 3

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mandi, has got a research project worth USD 1,00,000 (Rs 70 lakh) from Purdue Pharma, a USA-based pharmaceutical company.

Dr Varun Dutt, assistant professor, School of Computing and Electrical Engineering, IIT-Mandi, said a three-member delegation, including Larry A Pickett, vice-president and Chief Information Officer, Sayee Natarajan, director, Systems Development and Business Analytics, and Nataraj Dasgupta, data scientist from Purdue Pharma, had visited IIT-Mandi in July this year.

He said the firm signed a project worth USD 1,00,000 with IIT-Mandi. “The project deals with machine learning and data mining for sales and analytics in pharma,” he said.

The objective of the project was to study how social network analysis, patient journey and social media information could be used for finding prescribing histories and relationship among doctors in order to improve and provide the best health care for patients, he added.

At present, the project is running under three thematic areas.

First, to find the most influential doctors in a geographical area and how network of doctors changes as a result of medication prescribed, geographical distance between doctors, and doctor demographics.

Second, to find the journey of patients between doctors, hospitals, pharmacy, and diagnostic centres and also how these journeys are different for different medicines and patient demographics (age, gender and insurance plan).

Third, visualisation of big data in pharmaceutical industry concerning patients, doctors, and medicines and to develop new visualisation tools using parallel 3D coordinates and allied technologies.

Dutt said he was assisted by Abhinav Choudhury, Shruti Kaushik, Anzer Moid and Kaustub Mallik in the three-year project. “Abhinav is dealing with part one of the project, Shruti with part two and Anzer and Kaustubh with part three,” he said, adding the data was provided by the US firm for the project.

The delegates highlighted the potential of using technologies like KDB+, which could allow companies to reduce time, cost, and effort on IT projects involving large amounts of data, he said.

He said the delegation also discussed potential collaborative projects in diverse research areas with the faculty and students of the institute.

The interaction between IIT-Mandi and Purdue Pharma could create research opportunities between the two organisations, he said.