Mission

The films exist.
The readers don’t.

Across Afghanistan, clinics own working X-ray machines and have no radiologist to read the films — for a child’s fractured arm as much as for a tuberculosis screen. Partaw Research works to close that reading gap as a public good, and to build the missing evidence base while doing it.

Partner with us How the reading works

About 100

radiologists per million people in high-income countries

Fewer than 2

radiologists per million people in low-income countries

Radiologists per million people, one mark each. The gap is not a shortage of machines or of films; it is a shortage of the people qualified to read them. The low-income figure is an upper bound — fewer than two per million — so it is drawn down to the one whole mark that bound admits.1

Two-thirds: of the world’s population lacks access to basic diagnostic radiology.1
Dari or Pashto: every report is delivered in the clinic’s own language, over the WhatsApp thread it already uses.
One signature: a licensed radiologist’s name and license number on every report.

Not a machine gap.
A reader gap.

An X-ray is only as useful as its reading. Decades of aid and procurement have put working machines into district clinics and provincial hospitals; the training pipelines that produce people qualified to read the output have not kept pace, and the few specialists there are concentrate in the largest cities. So films wait, travel with relatives to Kabul, or go unread — and the fracture is set blind, the pneumonia is treated on guesswork, the tuberculosis walks back out the door.

This is what we mean by radiology access as a public good: the reading, not the machine, is the scarce resource. It can be delivered over infrastructure clinics already hold in their hands — a smartphone and a WhatsApp thread — by a licensed radiologist who may be anywhere.

What we do

A service worth studying. A study worth serving.

The reading, the evidence, and the corpus are one operation, run three ways at once.

Get films read: A licensed radiologist’s signed report, in Dari or Pashto, returned over the channel clinics already use — WhatsApp. Access and turnaround, where before there was no reader at all.
Build the evidence: Teleradiology in this setting is barely described in the literature. We run programs as studies — protocols, outcomes, and publications with academic partners — so the model can be judged, improved, and reused.
Grow a governed dataset: Consented, de-identified reads accumulate into a research corpus of rural Afghan radiology — a population nearly absent from the datasets modern imaging is built on — and, once counted weekly by province and finding, into a disease signal for the national surveillance system.

Outbreaks are counted.
From a sample.

In the first half of 2026, Afghanistan’s national surveillance counted suspected Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever rising twelvefold and acute watery diarrhoea more than threefold, while respiratory infection and pneumonia — the largest line in the table — ran above a hundred thousand cases a month through the winter3.

Every one of those counts comes from the sentinel sites: one public facility in seven, reporting weekly. Private clinics — where much of the country’s X-ray capacity sits — report to no one. The films read on this platform come from those clinics, and a chest film read and signed says whether a pneumonia is present, where, and when. That is thesurveillance program.

Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever× 12

41 → 483 suspected, a month

Acute watery diarrhoea× 3.4

5,299 → 18,232 with dehydration, a month

Dengue fever+99%

128 → 255 suspected, a month

Measles+26%

1,923 → 2,414 suspected, a month

COVID-19−29%

123 → 87 confirmed, a month

Respiratory infection & pneumonia−60%

162,472 → 65,673 cases a month

The numbers, as a table

New cases, 2026	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun
Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever (suspected)	41	38	59	152	176	483
Acute watery diarrhoea (with dehydration)	5,299	5,968	6,308	10,703	13,645	18,232
Dengue fever (suspected)	128	173	115	283	224	255
Measles (suspected)	1,923	2,603	2,395	3,181	2,318	2,414
COVID-19 (confirmed)	123	93	81	87	46	87
Respiratory infection & pneumonia (ARI)	162,472	157,046	105,904	131,697	80,330	65,673

New cases reported each month by the national surveillance system, January to June 2026, one panel per disease. Each panel is drawn on its own scale from zero; the panels are ordered by how far the count moved, so the outbreaks come first. Transcribed from WHO Afghanistan’s monthly situation reports and reconciled against their cumulative totals.3

Programs

The platform is the constant. Programs point it at a problem.

Each program aims the reading pathway at one clinical need, with its own partners, protocols, and dataset. The first and deepest is tuberculosis case-finding — Afghanistan carries a heavy TB burden2, and chest X-ray screening is where unread films cost the most.

The corpus

A corpus that exists nowhere else

Rural and peri-urban Afghan radiology, photographed from real films on real phones in a conflict-affected, high-burden setting — a population and an image modality nearly absent from the corpora that imaging research and imaging AI are built on. It accumulates read by read.

Research & partnerships

Consented at intake, before a film enters any research use.

De-identified at the platform boundary, before research use.

Shared under data-governance agreements.

Co-author it. Advise it. Validate on it.

We are looking for academic radiology and global-health programs, imaging-AI teams, TB-ecosystem NGOs and funders, and the surveillance programmes and implementing entities who need a private-clinic signal. What is on offer — authorship, advisory seats, a governed validation site, and a surveillance feed — is on the research page.

Partner with us See the offers

References

1Radiological Society of North America (2022), “The Global Radiologist Shortage — an Escalating Crisis”: fewer than two radiologists per million inhabitants in low-income countries versus roughly one hundred per million in high-income countries; an estimated two-thirds of the world’s population has little or no access to basic radiology services. www.rsna.org/news/2022/may/global-radiologist-shortage
2World Health Organization, Global Tuberculosis Report — Afghanistan country profile. Afghanistan is a high-TB-burden country in the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region. www.who.int/teams/global-tuberculosis-programme/tb-reports
3World Health Organization, Afghanistan Emergency Situation Reports Nos. 60–65 (January–June 2026), “Summary of infectious disease cases in Afghanistan” annex: new monthly cases by indicator from the national indicator-based surveillance system. The sentinel-site basis of that system (519 of 3,750 facilities; no private-facility reporting mechanism) is described in Ahmadi et al. (2024), PMC11059675. www.emro.who.int/images/stories/afghanistan/emergency-situation-report-65-June-2026.pdf

The films exist.The readers don’t.

Not a machine gap.A reader gap.