Microsoft has come up with an AI tool that can detect cases of cervical cancer faster than doctors.
Microsoft partnered with SRL Diagnostics to co-create an AI Network for Pathology to ease the burden of cytopathologists and histopathologists in a test lab in India which could aid doctors in countries that have an overwhelming number of patients.
Every year, SRL Diagnostics receives more than 100,000 Pap smear samples. As per reports, in India alone, as many as 67,000 women die every year from the disease, making up more than a quarter of global deaths stemming from cervical cancer.
This data was then used to train an AI algorithm, which eventually learned the ability to flag the difference between normal slides and the one showing signs of cancerous or pre-cancerous abnormalities.
Cytopathologists at SRL Diagnostics studied digitally scanned versions of Whole Slide Imaging (WSI) slides, each comprising about 300-400 cells, manually and marked their observations, which were used as training data for Cervical Cancer Image Detection API.
This will free SRL’s doctors, who get as many as 100,000 Pap smear samples every year, to focus on problematic samples solely.
