Microsoft is paving the way for the women of India to receive a prompt diagnosis of Cervical Cancer via AI, changing the game entirely for the nation where more than 25% of cervical cancer deaths occur.

Stark Reality

In India, around 67,000 women die each year due to late-term Cervical Cancer diagnosis, and lack of proper medical treatment. That’s an approximate 25% of Cervical Cancer deaths worldwide. Microsoft and SRL Diagnostics are looking to change the way in which Indian women receive the diagnosis and care they desperately need to be able to live and fight another day.

What it Is

SRL Diagnostics is the largest diagnostic chain to offer Cervical Cancer testing in India, and last year they were able to partner with none other than Microsoft to develop AI technology that may potentially alleviate some of the time-consuming burdens in diagnosis and treatment. It would also alleviate a major burden from the Cytopathologists and Histopathologists working at SRL.

One of the major roadblocks these women face in terms of treatment or receiving late treatment is the fact that there is a major time gap between the time testing is performed, and the time diagnosis is made. This has led to countless women meeting an unnecessary fate. With this new AI technology, however, the hope is that lives will be changed.

The Process

Receiving about 100K Pap smear samples to test each year, SRL Diagnostics has the daunting task of combing through each sample received, with around 98% of the tests received being normal, and about 2% of all tests being abnormal and requiring further intervention.

Not all abnormal pap smears prove cancerous, however – some may indicate pre-cancerous cells that could potentially lead to cancer later down the road. It’s also important for proper treatment to occur quickly in these situations to ensure nothing becomes of the cells more than what they were upon diagnosis.

The goal is that, by using AI, those 2% of abnormal tests will be diagnosed and found sooner than ever before.

The way they are training AI to recognize cancerous cells is by scientists inputting manually marked data from slides they are shown to train the AI’s brain, so to speak, to seek out cancerous cells.

Manish Gupta, Principal Applied Researcher at Microsoft Azure Global Engineering claims that the thought process behind this AI technology was to create sort of a consensus on the various areas assessed via the data that would be indicative of cancer or pre-cancer.

How it Works

“The images for which annotations were found to be discordant — that is if they were viewed differently by three team members — were sent to senior Cytopathologists for final analysis,” said Microsoft in a blog post.

SRL Diagnostics has claimed that their collaboration has shown promising results already as of just this week, with the Cervical Cancer Image Detection API beginning an internal preview of previously collected data.

The Way of the Future

The same data which is being utilized in India to help women be diagnosed and able to treat cancer is undoubtedly being considered for use in other places around the world. It’s only a matter of time before AI technology takes over in almost all facets of the medical industry. Despite your view on AI, you have to admit – this is one version of AI we can all rally behind.

#cancersucks