A United Kingdom-based Nigerian artificial intelligence (AI) research scientist and Founder of GenScan AI, Mary-Brenda Akoda, has disclosed plans to roll out her AI medical imaging solution in Nigeria and the UK by the second half of 2027 to help fast-track scan results and reduce patient backlogs globally.
Akoda, a Google DeepMind Scholar, ex-Microsoft engineer and Imperial College London-trained researcher, said her flagship innovation, GenMRI, is a first-of-its-kind AI imaging software that makes MRI scans up to 90 per cent faster on existing scanners without hospitals spending millions on new machines.
Speaking during an interactive session between 2026 NLNG Nigeria Prize Winners and journalists in Lagos, she explained that the software can reduce a 20-minute scan to as little as two minutes and an hour-long scan to six minutes, allowing hospitals and imaging centres to scan substantially more patients per day, cut waiting lists, reduce repeat scans and sedation costs, particularly for elderly patients, children and infants.
According to her, the technology was built and validated on over 8,800 Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images and later subjected to an early blinded assessment with a consultant radiologist at Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust in the UK.
She said the radiologist was not told which images were conventional and which were GenMRI-enhanced.
“The results came back scoring the GenMRI images as diagnostically equivalent to the conventional MRI images in all the cases assessed,” she said.
She noted that technical evaluation before the blinded assessment had shown up to 99.7 per cent similarity to conventional MRI images, with speed-ups ranging from four times to ten times.
Akoda said the system was developed on over 15,000 cardiac MRI images and validated on a separate set of over 7,700 images, with an additional out-of-distribution test on 1,125 knee MRI images it had never seen before, where it achieved up to 75 per cent shorter scans and outperformed state-of-the-art models in speed and image quality.
She said the inspiration for the innovation came from personal loss and lived experience of an overburdened health system, noting that delays in diagnosis can be fatal in time-critical conditions such as stroke and cancer.
She recounted how about three years ago, an elderly loved one suffered a stroke and could not get timely imaging due to long queues, leading to deterioration and death, an experience compounded by her own encounter with slow hospital processes.
“Every second counts and the difference between life and death can be how quickly a patient gets diagnosed,” she said.
She said stroke kills over 6.5 million people yearly worldwide and cancer over 10 million, with medical imaging often the first step to diagnosis, yet MRI scans take 15 minutes to over an hour, require patients to lie still in noisy enclosed spaces, and any movement leads to blurry images, repeat scans and sedation risks.
She said high-quality MRI machines cost between $1.5 million and $3.5 million each with a lifespan of seven to 10 years, making it unrealistic for many hospitals, especially in low-resource settings, to simply buy more scanners, hence the need to make existing scanners work up to 10 times faster.
She stated the larger vision was that no one suffers or dies because of a delayed diagnosis, with GenMRI designed as software-as-a-medical-device that can be integrated into hospital workflows either on cloud or on-premise, and extendable to Computed Tomography (CT) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans in future.
On commercialization and adoption, she said the team is now working with clinical partners and regulatory experts to secure approvals and run broader clinical pilots across scanners and body regions, while seeking health and innovation funders including the Gates Foundation, Global Innovation Fund, Development Innovation Ventures, Innovate UK and the European Union.
She said the Minister of Education had directed that clinical partners be facilitated across Nigeria following her public presentation, and she is in talks with the Chairman of the Committee of Chief Medical Directors of Federal Tertiary Hospitals to enable Nigeria to be among first adopters.
She said the innovation requires expensive regulatory pathways, with the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval alone costing $200,000 to $500,000 per country, making grants and venture capital critical.
On the NLNG Prize, which brought her work to wider attention, she said her mother shared the advert with her.
“She forwarded it to me and I was flattered that she believed her daughter could apply,” she said, adding that the prize’s theme around AI, ICT and digital technology fitted her background as both AI research scientist and software engineer.
