Naren Akash

I am an AI researcher. I think a lot about what it takes for AI systems to reason well, not just accurately but reliably. Things like staying grounded in evidence, being calibrated under uncertainty, and actually working in practice. I focus on healthcare and medicine, where these capabilities stop being nice-to-haves.

I lead the medical AI research at Intelligent Medicine in AIG Hospitals, the first dedicated AI center within a medical institute in India, where I am also a founding member. I have the rare privilege of building systems that live in real clinical settings, used by more than 600 physicians every day and touching different aspects of care for over 1,000 patients daily. These systems sit inside the EMR and PACS, not alongside them.

My work spans three threads. LLMs and agentic systems for clinical documentation and hospital workflows, from ambient scribes and discharge summaries to prior authorization and patient facing pre-consultation bots, and their evaluation in real-world deployment. Medical image analysis, where I care about architectural rigour as much as application, designing models that collaborate within the clinical workflow for triage and guidance. And AI for public health, using low-cost capture and screening to take care beyond the hospital.

Previously, I was at Microsoft Research working on multimodal LLMs and retrieval for clinical chatbots, and built surgical video analysis tools with Sankara Eye Foundation. I did my B.Tech (Honours) and MS by Research at IIIT Hyderabad, mostly at the Medical Image Analysis Lab in CVIT, fortunate to be mentored by Jayanthi Sivaswamy. I remain a computer engineer at heart, with a deep appreciation for robust software. I am also a believer in slow science.

I have served the medical imaging community through the MICCAI Student Board for over five years, as President since 2024, where I initiated and led key initiatives like the EMERGE workshop and the MICCAI Doctoral Symposium. I am on the Organizing Committees for MICCAI 2027 in Auckland and MICCAI 2028 in São Paulo. I currently collaborate with Mohit Jain (Microsoft Research), Shriti Raj (Stanford Medicine), and P J Narayanan and C V Jawahar (IIIT Hyderabad).