In India alone, roughly 67,000 women die of cervical cancer each year. At the same time, there’s just a handful of doctors that can process the pap smear tests which are used to detect this type of cancer.
The good news is that Microsoft and SRL Diagnostics have developed an AI tool that helps detect cervical cancer, freeing doctors in India and other countries where the sheer volume of patients could prove overwhelming.
The team trained an AI to spot signs of this type of cancer by feeding it “thousands” of annotated cervical smear images to help it spot abnormalities (including pre-cancerous examples) that warrant a closer look. Doctors would only have to look at those slides that justify real concern. SRL alone receives over 100,000 samples per year, and 98 percent of those are normal.
The AI would let doctors focus on just the two percent of samples that are problematic and help women start treatment sooner, providing a great incentive to put this into use as quickly as possible.
