About

A ray of light, taken literally

Partaw (پرتو) is Dari for a ray of light — which is what an X-ray is, and what a reading gives back.

partaw — a ray

radio
microwave
infrared
visible light — a quarter of one decade
ultraviolet
gamma

The electromagnetic spectrum, to scale on a logarithmic wavelength axis. Visible light is the sliver; an X-ray is light three decades past its violet end. That is the ray in the name, and the violet on this site.

Light that reaches where specialists don’t

A radiograph is a beam of light passed through a body; a diagnosis is what a trained eye makes of it. In most of Afghanistan the first half of that sentence happens every day and the second half doesn’t. Partaw — the ray — is the promise that the reading travels to the film, rather than the patient traveling to the reader.

People

Founder

Yasin Yaqoobi

Afghan-American engineer and applied-AI lead, Northern Virginia

Yasin leads the Applied AI Lab at a Fortune 500 company and builds the platform Partaw runs on. A native speaker of Dari and Pashto, he earlier built daridictionary.org, the first comprehensive English-to-Dari dictionary. He started Partaw to put modern AI to work on Afghan healthcare, built by Afghans for Afghans.

Role: Founder; builds and operates the platform
Field: Applied AI: search, model training, inference, agents
Languages: Dari, Pashto, English, Urdu

Full profile

Founding advisor · Research design

Dr. Ghulam Qader Qader

Tuberculosis programme physician and researcher, Kabul

Dr. Qader has worked inside Afghanistan’s national tuberculosis effort and led several of its published studies, from Kabul’s urban DOTS expansion to the national survey of latent infection among health workers. On the advisory board he holds the research design seat.

Seat: Research design, founding advisor
Based: Kabul, Afghanistan
Indexed papers: Six, 2017–2023; lead author on three

Full profile

Advisory board

Forming now, two founding seats open

We are assembling an advisory board across three responsibilities. Founding advisors are named here as seats fill — with their permission, their affiliation, and their role. Their mandate and terms of appointment are set out in the Board’s charter.

Clinical governance: Escalation rules, scope limits, and the standard every signed report is held to.; Open
Research design: What the studies must prove and how: endpoints, protocols, and the review pathway each partner institution requires.Dr. Ghulam Qader Qader — Management Sciences for Health, Kabul; Filled
Data governance: Who touches the corpus and on what terms: consent, de-identification, and access agreements.; Open

Ask about a founding seat Read the charter

Structure

How the two arms relate

Partaw Research is the research and public-good arm of Partaw. Formal nonprofit status is being established; we are seeking fiscal sponsorship in the meantime.

The teleradiology platform this mission runs on is built and operated by Partaw’s commercial arm, which serves paying clinics atpartaw.com. The relationship is disclosed in protocols and publications, and any transaction between the two is kept at arm’s length and documented.