Microsoft’s artificial intelligence helps diagnose cervical cancer

India holds the saddest lead in the world in cervical cancer deaths with 67,000 women a year, over 25% of the 260,000 deaths worldwide each year. The problem is in the early diagnosis due to the small number of pathologists and the large volume of patients.

So Microsoft developed an artificial intelligence tool in collaboration with SRL Diagnostics, the largest diagnostic chain in the country. Doctors checked thousands of digitally scanned patient slides with 300-400 cells each and recorded their observations to teach Cervical Cancer Image Detection artificial intelligence.

The system is currently being evaluated internally by SRL and is strongly motivated to market quickly to detect approximately 2% of samples that require further evaluation by physicians. Note that in case of early diagnosis, cervical cancer is treated with surgery with 90% of cases being fully cured.