# Tuberculosis

On severe tuberculosis CT, cavities and consolidations have soft-tissue density and are left out of lung masks by segmenters such as R231. LungMend treats mask correction as shape completion: a latent diffusion prior trained on 57 healthy lungs, conditioned on a synthetically corrupted mask and on bone anatomy that disease does not alter, with no pathological data or CT intensities. On 200 radiologist-corrected slices from 20 severe TB cases it reaches 0.986 Dice and 0.57 mm average surface distance, with cavity and consolidation recall of 0.993 and 0.981.

On severe tuberculosis CT, cavities and consolidations have soft-tissue density and are left out of lung masks by segmenters such as R231. LungMend treats mask correction as shape completion: a latent diffusion prior trained on 57 healthy lungs, conditioned on a synthetically corrupted mask and on bone anatomy that disease does not alter, with no pathological data or CT intensities. On 200 radiologist-corrected slices from 20 severe TB cases it reaches 0.986 Dice and 0.57 mm average surface distance, with cavity and consolidation recall of 0.993 and 0.981.

Tuberculosis still kills an estimated 1.23 million people a year, and high-burden regions lack the radiologists who read chest X-rays. Google Research and Google for Health handed its chest X-ray algorithms to Pretoria-based Nexus AI, which turned them into a CE-certified clinical diagnostic tool now deployed in about 40 healthcare facilities across six countries including South Africa, Sierra Leone and Côte d'Ivoire. More than 90 clinicians have evaluated over 25,000 chest radiographs, cutting turnaround from weeks to under 45 seconds for rapid triage, with final clinical decisions left to health workers.

Tuberculosis still kills an estimated 1.23 million people a year, and high-burden regions lack the radiologists who read chest X-rays. Google Research and Google for Health handed its chest X-ray algorithms to Pretoria-based Nexus AI, which turned them into a CE-certified clinical diagnostic tool now deployed in about 40 healthcare facilities across six countries including South Africa, Sierra Leone and Côte d'Ivoire. More than 90 clinicians have evaluated over 25,000 chest radiographs, cutting turnaround from weeks to under 45 seconds for rapid triage, with final clinical decisions left to health workers.

This review systematically compiles progress in the design, synthesis, and biological evaluation of indole-based small molecules as antitubercular candidates targeting the mycolic acid biosynthesis pathway (MmpL3, InhA, KasA/KasB), listing per-series optimized-compound MIC values (e.g., compounds 20-22 at 0.0195 µg/mL, compound 36a at 0.024 µM, and compound 82 with MIC50 0.015 µM in the MmpL3 direction; compounds 122a at 0.39 µM and 143f at 3.99 µM in the InhA direction) alongside molecular docking results, and noting that many indole series still lack direct biochemical inhibition data such as purified-enzyme IC50/Ki and genetic validation including resistance mutations or target overexpression.

This review systematically compiles progress in the design, synthesis, and biological evaluation of indole-based small molecules as antitubercular candidates targeting the mycolic acid biosynthesis pathway (MmpL3, InhA, KasA/KasB), listing per-series optimized-compound MIC values (e.g., compounds 20-22 at 0.0195 µg/mL, compound 36a at 0.024 µM, and compound 82 with MIC50 0.015 µM in the MmpL3 direction; compounds 122a at 0.39 µM and 143f at 3.99 µM in the InhA direction) alongside molecular docking results, and noting that many indole series still lack direct biochemical inhibition data such as purified-enzyme IC50/Ki and genetic validation including resistance mutations or target overexpression.