Lahore, September 4, 2026: The National Centre of Artificial Intelligence (NCAI), University of the Punjab (PU) and Shalamar Medical & Dental College (SMDC), Lahore have agreed in principle to explore strategic research and development collaboration in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Health Informatics, Digital Health and Smart Healthcare.

The understanding was reached during the first strategic R&D meeting held at Shalamar Medical & Dental College on September 3, 2026, bringing together senior medical professionals, clinical experts and AI researchers from both institutions.

The SMDC delegation was led by Prof. Dr. Zahid Bashir, Principal, SMDC, and included Dr. Ayesha Nouman, Chief Operating Officer, Shalamar Hospital, along with senior specialists from Medicine and Neurology, Obstetrics & Gynecology, Endocrine Surgery and Oncology, Gastroenterology, and Endocrinology. The NCAI-PU delegation was led by Prof. Dr. Syed Waqar-ul-Qounain Jaffry, Professor/Chairman, Department of Information Technology and Director, NCAI, along with Dr. Nadeem Akhtar, Associate Professor; Dr. Muhammad Adeel Nasar, Assistant Professor; and Dr. Muhammad Farooq, Associate Professor, Department of Information Technology, University of the Punjab.

The meeting focused on translating real-world clinical and healthcare challenges into collaborative AI-driven R&D projects. The participants identified several high-impact areas, including the development of large-scale healthcare datasets and national AI benchmarks, AI-enabled emergency and ICU monitoring, sensor-based patient monitoring, ECG and physiological signal analytics, neurological applications using EEG/MRI/CT data, stroke prediction, and AI applications for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

The two sides also discussed innovative applications in smart gynaecology and fetal monitoring, diabetes prediction, AI-enabled telemedicine, medical chatbots, Electronic Health Record (EHR) analytics, wound progression assessment, and intelligent patient assistants.

A particularly significant area of discussion was the development of a multi-agent clinical decision-support system for complex medical cases. The proposed approach could employ multiple specialized AI agents to analyse different aspects of a patient's clinical information and provide explainable, evidence-informed recommendations, with qualified healthcare professionals remaining central to the decision-making process.

The meeting also highlighted opportunities for AI-based biometric patient identification and emergency routing, predictive healthcare analytics, elderly-care solutions, and intelligent ICU monitoring. The participants emphasized that the development of such systems must be accompanied by appropriate safeguards concerning patient privacy, ethical approval, data security, anonymization, responsible AI and institutional governance.

Beyond individual research projects, the institutions discussed joint MPhil and PhD research, co-supervision of graduate students, joint research proposals, development of AI healthcare prototypes, joint publications and patents, seminars and workshops, and potential industry and international collaborations.

The participants further agreed to explore the development of a formal institutional collaboration framework through an MoU or Letter of Intent. They also proposed identifying three to five priority R&D projects and developing preliminary concept notes for potential funding through national and international research programmes.

The meeting concluded with a shared commitment to establish a multidisciplinary collaboration between clinical experts and AI researchers, leveraging SMDC's clinical and healthcare expertise and NCAI-PU's capabilities in AI, Machine Learning, Data Science, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Multi-Agent Systems and Explainable AI.

The collaboration is expected to provide a foundation for developing clinically relevant, responsible and scalable AI solutions for Pakistan's healthcare sector, while strengthening research, innovation and graduate-level capacity building in emerging areas of digital health.