A clinician who builds.

I trained as a doctor, specialised as a diagnostic radiologist, and spent years reading the scans of women whose cancers were found too late. Almost every time, the failure sat in the system around the medicine, long before anyone reached a scanner.

Screening works when it is easy to get to, and for millions of South African women it simply is not. The clinic is too far, the queue too long, the day off work too expensive. Closing that gap means physically reaching people, and that realisation took me from the reading room to the road.

In 2023 we put a single mammography truck on the road. Today Radhiant Diagnostic Imaging (RDISA) runs a national mobile screening network of seven 3D units that has reached more than 300 communities, screened more than 25 000 to date and referred more than 430 suspicious findings for biopsy, working with employers such as Vodacom and Sanlam to meet women at their workplaces, and through the Radhiant Foundation to sponsor mammograms for women who could otherwise not afford one.

The clinical grounding matters to me. I completed medical school, hold a fellowship in diagnostic radiology and a PhD from the University of Bristol, and served as a lead radiologist at Life Healthcare. My research years taught me to treat evidence as the floor, never the ceiling. The building years are teaching me everything else: operations, capital, leadership, and how a system either earns people's trust or quietly loses it.

This site is where I think in public about that work. The writing sits in three lanes: healthcare access as an infrastructure problem, field notes from building RDISA, and the human beings at the centre of both.

Selected work

• Peer-reviewed publications in paediatric neuroimaging.
• PhD (University of Bristol) on MRI in term hypoxic-ischaemic injury.
• Honorary lecturer and postgraduate supervisor, University of the Witwatersrand and University of Pretoria.
• National committee roles in radiology, including with the Radiological Society of South Africa.

On record

• The Easies 2026 shortlist: Anith Chacko, Founder, Radhiant Diagnostic Imaging (theeasies.com, October 2026)
• Radhiant brings breast screening closer to women this Pinktober (OFM, 1 October 2026)
• Bringing advanced radiology services to underserved communities with FUSO-converted mobile mammography units (FUSO South Africa, 20 March 2025)
• Radhiant Diagnostic Imaging: the service, the team and the record (rdisa.co.za)

How I work

I write from first-hand experience and published evidence, and I keep patient information out of everything here. Aggregate results only, never a person's details. Where I have a commercial interest close to a topic, I say so. You can see the roles and interests behind the writing on the Disclosures.