AI Tools Provide Picture of Cervical Health: Artificial Intelligence Simplifies Cervical Cancer Screening
Smartphone camera captures images of the cervix for digital analysis and accurately detects presence of precancer.
A: True negative (healthy)
B: True positive (abnormal)
Even though cervical cancer is considered one of the most preventable forms of cancer, it remains a serious and deadly scourge for many across the world. A computer algorithm designed to quickly and easily identify pre-cancerous changes using a regular smartphone may change that.
“The point of everything that we do and have done in the last 40 years is to understand something deeply so that we can invent simple tools to use,” says IRP senior investigator, Mark Schiffman, M.D., M.P.H. To that end, he and collaborators in the National Cancer Institute and the National Library of Medicine (NLM), in collaboration with the Global Health Labs and Unitaid, developed and are now testing a machine learning-based approach to screening for cervical cancer, with promising results.